Very unfortunate news in my personal opinion – the 2010 Census did not care to include information about native tongues/dialects, deeming it as not important. Progress and solidarity through a common language is one thing, but forgetting the lessons learnt through the formation of unique dialects is regrettable.
I for one can not speak my native tongue – Teochew, because of top-down government measures. From the Singapore model, I can attest that this vanishing of dialects can be irreversible; and it can vanish within one generation. I cannot help but feel a great sense of loss hearing this. Perhaps this will help shape a more uniform Chinese identity. Will that do much good? And perhaps, not.
Census vice-director Fang Nailin said the government decided that this piece of information was ‘not that important’.
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Chinese dialects vanishing in China
Mandarin threatening even native tongues as major as Cantonese
By Peh Shing Huei, China Bureau Chief
Source – Straits Times, published December 25, 2010
BEIJING: China’s numerous native tongues are slowly vanishing, with even major dialects spoken by tens of millions under threat from Mandarin.
The country’s three biggest cities – Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou – are seeing their mother tongues increasingly being drowned out, a trend experts believe may not be reversible.
In the Chinese capital, for example, the Beijinghua dialect, which is a close yet highly localised variant of Mandarin, is so little used that a linguist was prompted to compile a dictionary to preserve it. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: 2010 National Census, Beijing Consensus, Chinese Model, Culture, Domestic Growth, Education, Media, Population, Social, Straits Times, The Chinese Identity, The construction of Chinese and Non-Chinese identities
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