Hat tip to John over at Sinosplice.

Liang Yiwen of Shanghai Daily recently wrote an article called In search of pure Shanghai dialect which is available to read online. Here’s a snippet:

ONCE Shanghai dialect was widely understood in the region and known for its rich idiomatic speech, its memorable slang. But now even local Huju Opera has trouble finding speakers of pure and coherent Shanghaihua. Liang Yiwen reports.

In a race against time to rescue fast-fading Shanghai dialect, the city is putting out the call for native speakers whose pure and idiomatic speech will be recorded and used for research, preservation and promotion activities.

Have a look.

Things have been quiet over at the Wu Desk here at Sinoglot HQ. But fear not, the Annals have not been concluded. However the desk may sit vacant for a few good weeks yet. Here’s what’s on the schedule for the next two months that would cause this absence:

First, I’m leaving Shanghai for a while. I’ll be heading west to present a paper on the written standardisation (or lack thereof) of the Wu dialects at a linguistics conference this July. Unfortunately I still have a bit of work to do on the paper itself and so that’s likely to take up a bit of my time.

Second, other papers. I am a graduate student after all. However, one is likely to surface in the next few weeks, over at Echoes of Manchu of all places.

In addition to all of this, my light summer reading this year will mostly be 钱乃荣’s《上海语言发展史》which I picked up not too long ago along with his grammar of Shanghainese. I’m planning on writing chapter reviews to give an idea of the contents for those not wanting (or able) to read through the Mandarin text. There’s plenty being said on Shanghainese, but not always in a way accessible to the English speaking world. So while I may not be in Shanghai to report on the language, I will still make an attempt to do so from overseas.

I’ll try to keep 星期沪 going but I can’t make any promises as I’ll likely be without internet for long stretches.

That’s the latest. Regularly scheduled programs to resume this autumn.

This week’s Shanghai Friday phrase is once again from Tatoeba.

搿搭到哀面是老近个。
gəˀ tɑˀ tɔ ɛ mi zɿ lɔ ʥin gəˀ
从这儿到那儿是很近的。

In English it would be

It’s not far from here to there.

Note the use of 老 here sometimes written 佬. This is found in a number of Wu dialects in place of 很. And of course 个, long used in Wu where in Mandarin one would find 的.

Everybody poops. When I first came to China they taught me how to say “厕所在哪儿” even though everyone says something more like “洗手间在哪儿”. So wouldn’t it be useful to have a more subtle way to announce to the world what you’re about to do?

This week for Shanghainese Friday it’s just two words, and ones you already know, but maybe not in this context.

唱歌 － ʦʰɑ̃ ku － to sing a song
跳舞 － tʰiɔ vu － to dance

Yep. Singing and dancing. Singing is number one and dancing is number 2. Give it a shot with the inlaws. Let me know how it goes.