What Shanghainese Has Been Through These Years
As a native Shanghainese, I can confirm that Shanghainese, just like Tamil in Suresh Canagarajah’s article, is being forgotten as well, but not in a rate as furious as Tamil. Contradict to what Canagarajah introduces in his article that Tamil being forgotten is mainly due to immigration issues, the major cause of Shanghainese’s fading is the trumpeting of Mandarin by the Chinese government.
In order to promote the unification of language in China, meaning to make sure that people from different regions of China can communicate with each other without difficulties, advocating Mandarin was proposed by the government as the remedy around 2000. As a result of this, all schools in China started to promote the use of Mandarin. This movement was especially phenomenal in Shanghai because since Shanghai is one of the most prosperous cities in China that huge amount of people from all over the country come to Shanghai for business and travel, it’s of vital importance to eliminate language barriers in Shanghai. To be specific, started then, all schools in Shanghai prohibited students as well as the faculty from speaking their dialect. My personal experience is that my elementary school and middle school got me into the habit of speaking Mandarin more than Shanghainese, and the sole reason why I can still speak Shanghainese is that my parents have the foresight and force me to speak only Shanghainese at home. But for many of my classmates, although they are native Shanghainese, they can merely understand some conversations and that’s it. Personally, I reckon only emphasize the use of Mandarin but omit Shanghainese is really something dumb to do since the Shanghainese is not only a dialect, but more like a manifestation of the culture of the city. There are so many idiomatic expressions that can’t even be translated to Mandarin, although they are suppose to be the “same language”. If Shanghainese was eventually forgotten by people, Shanghai would just become any of the big cities because there’s nothing to make Shanghai charming and special anymore.
The situation didn’t become better until I entered high school. After about ten years of observation, the government finally realized that promoting Mandarin but ignoring the local dialect is not a wise decision. In order to mitigate the problem, the use Shanghainese is promoted again, especially in public facilities. Now, all subway stations in Shanghai have services offered in Shanghainese and there is voice announcement in Shanghainese as well, so as in buses. Although I believe Mandarin is still the dominating language in schools, Shanghainese is indeed used more and more often in the city.
