Language Tourism: A Look At “Dialects” in China, On My Latest Trip Back
Whenever I travel, I try to use it as an opportunity to learn or practice languages. Or more of an excuse in some cases, I guess. For example, on the one hand, I very justifiably brushed up on Spanish and Haitian Creole prior to a trip to the DR and Haiti two years ago. On the other hand, I also decided to brush up on Persian and pick up some Armenian for a trip to… Los Angeles last year, which wasn’t quite as necessary — but still occasionally informative.
This January, I took a trip back to China for the first time in a long while, and even though I’d lived in Shanghai for a decade as a kid, this was still a chance for a bit of linguistic exploration. As I’ve touched on in previous posts, I’ve been rediscovering my (semi-)native Shanghainese recently and dabbling in other Chinese “dialects” as well, so this was a good chance for me to get some ad hoc language immersion, and to collect some linguistic data (or anecdotes, at least) on the ground.
I had somehow unintentionally managed to put off a trip back to China for six whole years, so my newfound linguistic interest was hardly the only thing that had changed in the meantime — the number of subway lines in Shanghai had doubled, people had almost fully transitioned to a cashless economy, and Shanghai is now home to the second-tallest skyscraper in the world. It was a lot to take in.
My trip lasted for three and a half weeks. For half the time, I stayed with family in Shanghai and did some traveling in the nearby area, and for the other half of my trip I went south to Guangdong to explore a bit on my own.
Linguistically speaking, that means I spent half my trip in the Wu/Mandarin border region of the Yangtze River Delta, and the other half in the Yue (Cantonese) region of the Pearl River Delta. Economically speaking, those are also two of China’s largest metropolitan mega-regions.
(Side note: I’m going to be sidestepping the language/dialect debate by just using the word “dialect” in quotation marks a lot.)
Part 1: The Yangtze River Delta
Standard Mandarin (a.k.a. Putonghua)
Okay, first thing’s first. The linguistic elephant in the room, the unavoidable superstratum that looms over all other Chinese “dialects” — both in China and the diaspora these days — is of course Standard Mandarin.
I generally consider Mandarin to be one of my two native languages, but I also think my Mandarin improved noticeably over the course of my trip. 🤔 This was mainly just because I was being exposed to Mandarin in a much wider range of contexts than usual, including professional ones — I worked remotely from my company’s Shanghai office to save on vacation days, and the working language there was primarily Mandarin, even though it was an American company.
Furthermore, I was forced to avoid code-switching between Chinese and English a lot of the time, which is something I do constantly in the State. This meant I had to learn how to say “marketing” and “business model” and “supply chain” in Mandarin, for example. And of course, I picked up a bit of slang and terminology for concepts that weren’t as widespread the last time I was in China (e.g. 网红 for “internet celebrity” or 人肉 for “doxxing”).
Lower Yangtze Mandarin
Speaking of “Mandarin”, it’s worth mentioning that the term has another, broader meaning in Chinese dialectology, which is why I made sure to say “standard Mandarin” above. Besides the standard national language, based on the Beijing dialect, “Mandarin” can also refer to a much larger swathe of related “dialects” stretching across north China.
Further inland, the Mandarin zone extends south through Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan all the way to the Burmese border (and actually into Burma). Along the coast, on the other hand, Mandarin’s historical range ends roughly at the Yangtze river, where it borders on Wu dialects like Shanghainese — but with a slight slant so that some areas south of the river (e.g. Nanjing, a former capital that attracted a lot of northern influence) are Mandarin-speaking, while some parts north of the river near the sea are Wu-speaking instead.
In the first week of my trip, my family and I took a bullet train across this Wu/Mandarin border to visit Yangzhou, a provincial town on the north bank of the Yangtze. Historically located in the backyard of the imperial court at Nanjing, Yangzhou is famous for its… artisanal knives among other things.
We spent a few days in Yangzhou visiting various gardens and temples as well as the old city center. Most locals obviously spoke standard Mandarin with us, so I didn’t really get to hear a whole lot of the local variant, though I must say there were a few times when I couldn’t fully understand what local taxi drivers and security guards were saying until they repeated themselves slowly. I looked for a bit more information on Lower Yangtze Mandarin online, and it seems pretty interesting — 1) there’s clearly a strong Wu substratum in the area, and the pronunciation of some words is closer to Shanghainese than to Beijing Mandarin, and 2) the Mandarin of this region was actually once the standard Mandarin, before the Beijing standard took over.
Another fun(?) fact about the Lower Yangtze Mandarin zone: folks from this area, north of the Yangtze River, were historically stereotyped by Wu-speaking people in Shanghai as rustic and unsophisticated, and were referred to as “kang boq gnin” (江北人, “river-north people” — there’s no widely-recognized Romanization for Shanghainese, so this is the best approximation of the pronunciation I can come up with).
Speaking of which, it’s about time I got to the main feature of this section…
Shanghainese
The thing about being out of town for six years is that when you do eventually make your way back, it becomes a major occasion for the whole extended family. (My brother was also in town around the same time, which made this a double rarity.)
Throughout the many family gatherings that this entailed, nearly all of the conversation among older relatives was conducted in Shanghainese, although some of them would switch to Mandarin when talking to me, my brother or my cousins. Of course, this is something that I was familiar with from growing up in Shanghai, so it wasn’t exactly a new revelation — but this time around I found myself paying a lot more attention to the sociolinguistic contexts where Shanghainese was used, and while Mandarin is certainly getting more and more widespread, Shanghainese was still far from restricted to familial contexts.
While going about the city for day-to-day tasks, my parents mainly spoke Shanghainese with security guards, taxi drivers, and shopkeepers — although it was sometimes necessary to switch to Mandarin, as more out-of-towners have been taking up these roles recently. In the office, many of my coworkers were from other parts of China (and relatively young), so Mandarin was the natural common language. However, the janitorial staff was Shanghainese-speaking, so I would occasionally hear coworkers speaking with them in Shanghainese too.
In a few small ways, Shanghainese has even gained ground since when I was in school. A few years ago, buses in Shanghai started playing recorded announcements in Shanghainese, in addition to Mandarin and English. (Subways still only do announcements in Mandarin and English though — perhaps because buses are considered a more “local” form of transportation.)
Other Wu Dialects
Shanghai has a relatively short history, at least by Chinese standards. It only started developing into an actual city after the first Opium War, and things really picked up speed in the early 20th century as people started pouring in from surrounding towns in northern Zhejiang and southern Jiangsu, bringing a variety of Wu sub-dialects along with them. These Wu varieties eventually blended together to form what is now known as Shanghainese —largely displacing the original “local dialect”* that was spoken by people in the area before.
In fact, the development of the modern Shanghai city dialect happened so recently that most people in my parents’ generation grew up hearing plenty of other northern Wu dialects in their homes and neighborhoods, like Ningbo-ese, Shaoxing-ese or Chongming-ese, to the point that they can still easily identify and imitate many of them. So I also got to hear bits of these other, older dialects during my time in Shanghai.
(*The original “local dialect” of Shanghai held on for longer in eastern areas of Shanghai like Pudong, which was relatively underdeveloped until quite recently. Because my high school was located in Pudong, I actually had several classmates who spoke that dialect rather than “standard” city-center Shanghainese. A few times in high school when we went volunteering in the nearby area, these classmates had to help serve as interpreters between older residents and the rest of us.)
Part 2: The Pearl River Delta
After acclimating and recovering from jet lag at home in Shanghai, I took a flight south to check out Guangdong province, which I’d never visited before. In some ways, visiting this other province of China was almost like visiting another country — in terms of differences in local language and climate, I guess it would be something like going from Brussels to Lisbon.
My first stop in Guangdong was the hi-tech boom-town of Shenzhen, after which I hopped across the border to Hong Kong (where I had spent a summer in college), and finished up with a visit to the historic port city and provincial capital of Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton.
I had been working on my Cantonese comprehension for a few months in advance (with Glossika recordings and a few books), so I was very interested in seeing how widely Cantonese was actually spoken in this area. And the answer was totally different for each of the three cities.
Shenzhen is really not a Cantonese-speaking city at all, at this point. Sure, announcements in the Shenzhen metro are in Cantonese as well as Mandarin and English, and I once saw (someone I assume was) a Hong Kong businessman try to order food at a KFC in Cantonese… but that was basically all the Cantonese I heard in Shenzhen. (Of course, unlike in Shanghai, I have no family in Shenzhen, so I might have missed out on Cantonese spoken behind closed doors. But at the very least it seems clear that Cantonese has less of a presence on the street, or in restaurants and other public spaces, in Shenzhen than Shanghainese has in Shanghai — which isn’t even that high of a bar.)
Then again, thirty years ago, Shenzhen wasn’t really a city of any kind — it was a fishing village whose name meant (and means) “deep drainage ditch in a field.” But being right across the border from Hong Kong, it seemed like the perfect place to set up a special economic zone (SEZ) which ended up attracting people from all over the country, especially from nearby inland provinces like Guizhou (mainly Southwest Mandarin-speaking) and Hunan (which has its own dialect group, Xiang).
But even before the crazy economic boom of the past thirty years, the area around Shenzhen was at best half Cantonese-speaking. About half of the pre-SEZ population of Shenzhen actually spoke Hakka, which is a separate dialect group from Yue/Cantonese. If you look at the dialect map/title image for this post, the Hakka-Yue border almost cuts Shenzhen in half. And if you go just one town over to the east, you’ll see that neighboring Huizhou is still mainly Hakka-speaking.
Everything changed when I crossed the border from Shenzhen into Hong Kong — my cellphone stopped working (I’d have to turn on roaming for my mainland mobile plan), I had to carry cash on me again (WeChat Pay wasn’t nearly as widespread), the HSBC billboards went from saying 汇丰 (simplified)to 滙豐 (traditional!!!!), and of course, the primary language in most of the city became Cantonese.
The clearest sign of the continued dominance of Cantonese in Hong Kong is that newcomers are trying to learn it. One evening, I went to check out a conversation group for locals trying to improve their English (or, less often, Mandarin), as well as people from both the mainland and overseas who were trying to improve their Cantonese — people from Shanghai and Hangzhou, but also from the U.S., Canada and Sri Lanka. I managed to fumble my way through a casual conversation in Cantonese myself (it was my first serious attempt), but some of the other out-of-towners had really learned Cantonese to an impressively high level.
The language mix at my company’s office in Kowloon was also quite intriguing. The employees there were a mix of local Hongkongers, mainlanders, and other expats, and while many of the mainlanders in the office had learned a bit of Cantonese, and vice versa, locals and mainlanders most often chose to speak to each other in English instead. At lunchtime in the cafeteria I sat with a group of Mandarin-speaking coworkers, while the team sitting next to me in the office would discuss work-related issues in Cantonese.
I heard plenty of other languages in Hong Kong too — Japanese and Korean in tourist areas, Indonesian and Filipino among the large migrant worker populations, as well as some Somali, Arabic, and Urdu all concentrated in one particular building — the Chungking Mansions apartment complex. It was a fascinating place that I remembered from my previous stay in Hong Kong, so I made sure to revisit it.
The language situation in Guangzhou is somewhere in between that of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. After all, “Cantonese” is named after this city, and the urban dialect of Guangzhou has historically been considered the prestige dialect — although Hong Kong Cantonese might be taking over that role these days.
In Hong Kong, a few locals had told me that the Cantonese in Guangzhou was no longer authentic due to Mandarin influence — for example, where Hong Kong Cantonese still uses saan for “to close (a door)” and sik for “to turn off (a light)”, in Guangzhou people have started using gwaan for both, which is the same as in Mandarin. (On the other hand, Hong Kong Cantonese has lost some traditional tone and sound distinctions and also uses more English loans, so… I’m not sure either side is really winning the “authenticity” contest here.)
Before visiting Guangzhou, I had imagined that the status of Cantonese there would be a bit like that of Shanghainese in Shanghai, and that did feel about right. I frequently overheard people of all ages chatting in Cantonese in restaurants, bars and on the subway, while I didn’t have to speak a word of Cantonese myself to get around town.
One big difference with the Shanghainese situation is that, partially due to the complex relationship with Hong Kong, Cantonese has received a greater amount of official support than most other local “dialects”. While flipping through channels on the TV at my hotel, I found almost a dozen channels in Cantonese — news broadcasts, Mandarin TV-shows dubbed into Cantonese, and even basketball games with live Cantonese commentary — all of which seemed unimaginable for Shanghainese.
That said, plenty of people do seem to be concerned about the long-term prospects of Cantonese in Guangzhou. Since I was only in the city for about 24 hours, I can’t really say much about long term trends, but ideally I’d hope some sort of equilibrium could be reached where people can speak both Cantonese and Mandarin — like the way north Indian languages manage to exist side-by-side with Hindi, for example.
Like “Mandarin”, the term “Cantonese” could use a bit more clarification. A lot of the time (more so in Chinese than in English) the term Cantonese and the more technical term “Yue” (or “Yuht” in Cantonese itself) get used interchangeably, but the two terms are not actually equivalent. “Yue” is strictly speaking the name of a larger group of “dialects” and includes other local varieties like Taishanese, which was historically the lingua franca of Chinatowns in North America before the 1960s. I didn’t encounter any Taishanese during my trip, but I’ve looked into it a bit recently, and it really isn’t very mutually intelligible with Guangzhou/Hong Kong Cantonese.
(By the way: for reasons I still don’t fully understand, the Defense Language Institute once produced a Taishanese course which you can find online here. I mean, I’m not complaining about the existence of more language material, but… was the Department of Defense planning to invade Chinatown? Or just one district of Guangdong in particular? 🤔)
I didn’t intentionally stay away from China for six whole years, but I suppose the long time away did help give me a different perspective once I did go back. Since my last time in China, I had been to a dozen other countries and learned a handful of new languages to fluency, all while China itself was also changing at a mind-boggling pace. For much of this trip, I was able to experience the country with the same curiosity (and amazement) with which I’d experience another foreign country.
While hanging out with other language enthusiasts, I often joke about how glad I am to speak Chinese natively, just so I don’t need to spend any more time learning it later on. Which is reasonable, to a point — I definitely have a head start when it comes to knowing stuff about China and its languages — but the fact is, China is still an insanely large country that has tons of stuff going on in it that I know very little about. And I think that’s actually great — this just means there’s another large chunk of the planet that I can enjoy finding out more about in the future.
