Shanghainese - History and Current Status

History and Current Status

Shanghai did not become a regional centre of commerce until it was opened to foreign investment during the late Qing Dynasty. Consequently, dialects spoken around Shanghai had long been subordinate to those spoken around Jiaxing and later Suzhou. In the late 19th century, most vocabulary of the Shanghai region had been a hybrid between Northern Jiangsu and Ningbo dialects. Since the 1850s, owing to the growth of Shanghai's economy, Shanghainese has become one of the fastest-developing dialects of Wu Chinese, undergoing rapid changes and quickly replacing Suzhou dialect as the prestige dialect of the region. It underwent sustained growth that reached a hiatus in the 1930s during the Republican era, when migrants arrived in Shanghai and immersed themselves in the local tongue.

After 1949, the government introduced Mandarin as the national language of all China. The influence of Shanghainese began to wane. Especially since Chinese economic reform began in 1978, Shanghai became home to a great number of migrants from all over the country. Due to the national prominence of Mandarin, learning Shanghainese was no longer necessary for migrants, because those educated after the 1950s could generally communicate in Mandarin. However, Shanghainese remained a very important part of the city's culture, and retained its prestige status within the local population. In the 1990s, it was still common for local radio and television broadcasts to be in Shanghainese. In 1995, a TV series called "Nie Zhai" (the Evil Debt) was broadcast entirely in Shanghainese; when it was broadcast outside of Shanghai (mainly in adjacent Wu-speaking provinces) Mandarin subtitles were added. The Shanghainese TV show "Lao Niang Jiu" (Old Uncle) has been broadcast since 1999, and is still quite popular among Shanghainese residents. Shanghainese programming has since declined, over concerns of regionalism/localism accusations.

From 1992 Shanghainese use was discouraged in schools, and many children native to Shanghai can no longer speak Shanghainese. In addition, Shanghai's emergence as a cosmopolitan global city consolidated the status of Mandarin as the standard language of business and services.

Since 2005, new movements have emerged to protect Shanghainese. At municipal legislative discussions in 2005, former Huju actress Ma Lili moved to "protect" the language, stating that she was one of the few remaining Huju actresses who still retained authentic classic Shanghainese pronunciation in their performances. Shanghai's former party boss Chen Liangyu, a native Shanghainese himself, reportedly supported her proposal. There have been talks of re-integrating Shanghainese into pre-kindergarten education, because many children are unable to speak any Shanghainese. Now many Shanghai dialect programs are running; a citywide program was introduced by the city government's language committee in 2006 to record native speakers of different Shanghainese varieties for archival purposes.

The Shanghai government has begun to reverse its course and seek fluent speakers of "real" authentic Shanghainese, but to their horror, due to the national government's effort to wipe out dialects and locality-focused aspects of Chinese culture, only two out of thirteen recruitment stations have found Traditional Shanghainese speakers; the rest of the 14 million people of Shanghai speak Modern Shanghainese, and it has been predicted that local dialects will be wiped out. Professor Qian Nairong is working on efforts to save the dialect. Qian Nairong is promoting Shanghainese language and culture in the face of an onslaught of Mandarin by the national government which left schoolchildren speaking poor Shanghainese. In response to criticism, Qian reminds people that Shanghainese was once fashionable, saying, "the popularization of Mandarin doesn’t equal the ban of dialects. It doesn’t make Mandarin a more civilized language either. Promoting dialects is not a narrow-minded localism, as it has been labeled by some netizens.” The singer and composer Eheart Chen sings many of his songs in Shanghainese instead of Mandarin to preserve the dialect.

Since 2006 the Modern Baby Kindergarten in Shanghai has prohibited its students from speaking anything but Shanghainese on Fridays to preserve the dialect.

Professor Qian says that few Shanghainese people under the age of sixty can speak real Shanghainese, and he urges that Shanghainese be taught in the regular school system from kindergarten, saying it is the only way to save Shanghainese, and that attempts to introduce it in university courses and operas are not enough.

Fourteen native Shanghainese speakers had audio recordings made of their Shanghainese on May 31, 2011. They were selected based on accent purity and other factors.