Another of my older friends always quickly slips into Shanghainese when we dine with friends from his generation, leaving me to struggle to understand bits and pieces of conversation that resemble Mandarin. But he goes easily back into Mandarin whenever there are more than three or four non-native Shanghainese around.
I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I've made only a very little effort to learn the dialect during my more than three years in the city. I made similarly little effort to learn the local dialect while living in Taiwan for three years.
The only place where I made an active effort was in Hong Kong when I lived there in the late 1980s. At that time Hong Kong was still under British control and little or no Mandarin was spoken there. Foreigners could sometimes survive with English, but often even English wasn't sufficient when dining in local eateries or going to some more remote villages where only Cantonese was spoken.
All of that brings me back to my own central view, which is that language is first and foremost a tool for communicating. In modern Shanghai and Taiwan, I could communicate very well with nearly everyone using Mandarin, and therefore saw less urgency to learn the local dialect. In 1980s Hong Kong, by comparison, learning Cantonese was more a matter of survival.
So, where does that leave me in terms of my views on the worthiness of preserving Shanghai dialect, or local dialects in general? I think most people would agree that there's simply no way to preserve the big majority of Chinese dialects, since many are spoken only in small areas and lack any intellectual community to lobby for their survival. Such a process certainly wouldn't be unique to China, as most modern countries in Europe had many local dialects that died out as communications and mobility improved and standard versions of the language become the norm.
Still, many dialects do continue to exist in Europe and are relatively widely spoken in some places. That said, efforts like "Cool! Shanghai" seem not only admirable, but also critical for the survival of that or any other dialect in China's current landscape of growing wealth and mobility.
This kind of effort looks smart to me, because it seeks to add a "cool" and special element to speaking Shanghainese, which is clearly aimed at the younger generation whose interest is critical to the survival of any language.
In addition to appealing to locals, proponents of saving the dialect might even try to broaden their efforts by reaching out to include outsiders in the effort to popularize speaking and enjoying the language, rather than keeping it in the exclusive domain of city natives.
Who knows - maybe with that kind of more inclusive outreach, even a foreigner like myself might be convinced to put more effort into learning this colorful language and important part of Shanghai's history and culture.
Exhibition marks 10th anniversary of Leslie Cheung's death
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