Maybe it’s just my own proximity to the subject, and maybe I just never paid it any attention in the West or Middle East, but there seems to be an exceptionally high occurrence of non-locals trying to speak local topolects. Granted, not many are trying to pass as 丹阳人, but it has happened. My proof has since been taken off Youku, but trust me, it was there.
There’s what I assume to be a quite popular show aired in Taiwan called 康熙來了 which to me anyway is the Platonic form of a Mandopop talk show. The hosts are Xú Xīdì 徐熙娣, better known as 小S, and Cài Kāngyǒng 蔡康永. Cài is from a rather old and rich family in Shanghai, my sources tell me. On this particular Friday afternoon, my background noise is some other variety type show hosted by the pair. And, as happens from time to time, the topic of topolects came up. 小S asked him how to say a number of things in Shanghainese. He did, and she attempted with some success to repeat the phrases.
As I mentioned, this seems to happen quite often. There are forum posts upon forum posts of how to say things in local dialects. Each of these that I’ve seen has a number of replies showing some interest. While no one is really going to make a major effort to learn one fully, which includes people I know who’ve moved here 10 years ago and still can’t understand much more than the basics, people do have some awareness of and at least passing interest in them.
The thing is, I can’t see this happening in the states. While we have people like Hugh Laurie (House) and Anna Torv (Fringe) who’ve made their television careers by faking another single dialect, I don’t see Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special dedicating ten minutes on how to speak like you’re from Philadelphia.
It makes me wonder what this does, if anything, for preservation. It seems obvious to me that this wouldn’t in any way dilute a dialect. But could it help? Do any universities in Shanghai teach Wu as a second language in the same way you can study Uyghur in Ürümqi? If so, seriously let me know. I’ll make sure to enrol for the fall term.
I’ve always assumed interest in topolects was a fairly global phenomenon – there’s something interesting about people who come from the same country/speak the same basic language as you but speak differently, and I’ve had plenty of conversations with Scottish and Northern people (I’m from the south of England myself) about how they say certain things, and it always proves immensely amusing for all involved. I’ve seen it on the TV quite a bit as well; although perhaps not as much as in China.
However passing interest would do little, if anything, for preservation. For preservation to occur I think there has to be a demand or need for the language – and the transmission of the odd bit of ‘hilarious’ dirty language, or casual greeting, hardly counts as preserving a language/dialect/topolect for future generations.
Wholly agree that passing interest is just that: passing. What it may point to instead is an underlying and more general interest.
I guess the reasons I see it as different from the situation in the UK/US would be largely based on where it comes up. We can (and often do) sit around with other Anglophone foreigners and share variant pronunciation, but it is often short lived, at least in my experience. There are a number of sites/posts/threads that give examples of this (e.g. How to Speak like a Kiwi), but again, not ever on a popular tv show. Again, not at least in my experience.
The other and perhaps bigger difference is the degree to which the topolects vary. I just wrote another post about someone I know being denied a job because they grew up 20 minutes east of the employer and therefore had the wrong dialect. Meanwhile my Nantong friends lace their conversations with snippets of Cantonese only half-jokingly and without an end in sight.
I can’t say I really think this will save Wu or any other Chinese language from the occasional push for Mandarin-only. I just think it can’t hurt anything.
I’ve not spent much time in Ningbo or Wenzhou, but friends from there have told me that many 外地人 there take classes in order to learn the local dialect. In Jinhua (central Zhejiang) where I’ve been, it was not at all like that. There was still noticeable discrimination against outsiders, but much less dialect prestige or use.
English simply isn’t comparable to Chinese at all in the range of its topolects. We have an overwhelmingly dominant dialect (Standard English) with a limited amount of lexical variation and a large amount of accent variation (several dozen accents, none of them dominant). Discussions of accent or lexis therefore do pop up, as do to some extent discussions of the differences across full dialect boundaries, like Standard versus AAVE (but that is racially charged and a touchy subject for many).
Once across a mutual intelligibility border, though, things change: it’s a much deeper act of language geekery to sit with a Dutch-speaking person and discuss (most probably in English) how English and Dutch are different.