On April 28, Guo Degang, a wellknown crosstalk performer from the Beijing-based Deyun Xiangsheng Troupe, held a special show at the Shanghai International Gymnastic Center. The theater was far more crowded than it was in 2006 when Guo first put on a show in Shanghai.
　　But Guo’s audiences in Shanghai were largely migrants from northern provinces. Very few native Shanghai people attended his performance due to a language barrier, though Guo’s Beijing dialect is similar to Mandarin, China’s standard language that is taught in schools across the country.
　　A similar problem has also occurred with Zhou Libo, a famous comedian who uses the Shanghai dialect on stage. Though Zhou frequently gives performance in Beijing, local Beijingers are rarely present at his shows.
　　Many entertainers have complained that they were unable to reach audiences outside their home cities.
　　“When we go to Beijing, we can only sing in Mandarin, which cannot express properly what we originally want to say with the lyrics,” said Mei’er, a singer of Top Floor Circus, a rap band from Shanghai.
　　 Speaking Mandarin
　　 According to statistics on the website of China’s Ministry of Education, the country has more than 80 dialects and languages among its 56 ethnic groups.
　　Communicating across various dialects has long been a problem in China. In the early 20th century, some Shanghai intellectuals launched the Common Chinese Language Movement to create a common vernacular medium for national communication. The Beijing dialect was chosen as the pronunciation standard, due to the large number of speakers and its relative simplicity.
　　Wen Zhao, a student at the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU), feels more comfortable using the Beijing dialect.“I am from northeastern Liaoning Province. The dialect of Liaoning always features in comedies and if I speak the Liaoning dialect, people begin laughing as soon as I start speaking,” he told Beijing Review.
　　Wen’s words were echoed by quite a few young people, who don’t want to be labeled as outsiders by speaking their local dialects.
　　Wu Xiaoyang, who comes from southwest China’s Sichuan Province, felt like an outsider during her first semester at BFSU as she could only speak the Sichuan dialect.“All my teachers in primary and middle schools spoke the Sichuan dialect. I really could not get used to the new language environment in Beijing,” she said.
　　But Wu is lucky to some extent. For most Chinese people, adjusting to the Beijing dialect, which Mandarin is based on, is much easier than learning the dialects of southern regions of China such as Shanghainese or Cantonese.
　　Zheng Qiang is from Anhui Province and he stayed in Shanghai after graduating from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Zheng feels uncomfortable when some Shanghai locals speak Shanghainese at meetings. “It is actually offensive for them to do this as they know quite a few people at the meetings don’t understand Shanghai dialect,”Zheng said.
　　Chen Yizhu, a woman from Jiangsu Province, has been working in a law firm in Hong Kong for eight months, but she can only understand about half the Cantonese words she hears. “They employ me for my professional knowledge, but I am not prepared to learn another language for the job.”
　　For Zheng and Chen, to spread Mandarin is necessary since it can avoid the incon- veniences caused by the differences of the dialects.
　　 Maintaining identity
　　 In 1986, spreading Mandarin was the prime task of language regulators nationwide. Most of the broadcast programs on TV and radio are required to be in Mandarin and announcers are required to pass a test of Mandarin before they are employed. School teachers all over the country have been encouraged to speak Mandarin in classes.
　　However, this emphasis on Mandarin prompted growing complaints in recent years that fewer and fewer young people are conversant in local dialects.
　　“Now it is very hard to find a young announcer who can speak solid Hokkien dialect,”said Chen Zhilong, a producer from southeast China’s Fujian TV Station. “They all speak perfect Mandarin and, judging from the pronunciation, it is hard to tell where they are from.”
　　In 2007, Fujian TV Station started to offer some news programs in Hokkien, which originates from south Fujian. “Local people always asked us why we don’t have any programs in Hokkien and I think if we don’t do anything about it, fewer and fewer people will be able to understand and speak our local language,” Chen said.
　　Liu Xiaoyu, a 7-year-old boy from Quanzhou City in Fujian can speak very flu-ent Mandarin but has a poor command of Hokkien. “We speak Mandarin in school. Teachers told us if we spoke Hokkien, that would have a bad influence on our pronunciation of Mandarin,” Liu said.
　　For Huang Xiaoliang, a member of the Fujian Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference(CPPCC), the local advisory body, Hokkien is not just a dialect, but contains cultural features.
　　Huang said that Hokkien keeps the pronunciation of ancient Chinese. “If you read a poem from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in Hokkien, it sounds more pleasant than reading it in Mandarin. Local operas, which are usually performed in dialects, are another part of the culture that should be preserved along with local languages,” he said.
　　Efforts to preserve local dialects are also underway in Shanghai. In March 2011, linguists in Shanghai started to recruit volunteers to record all branches of the Shanghai dialect for archival purposes.
　　“We don’t know how our ancestors spoke during the Ming (1368-1644) or Qing dynasties (1644-1911). We can only find some expressions from novels or other written records. The vocal database uses modern technology to record voices which our descendents will be able to listen to,” said You Rujie, a professor at the Chinese Language and Literature Department of Fudan University in Shanghai.
　　The database in Shanghai is the third of its kind in China. Similar databases have also been set up in Jiangsu and Yunnan provinces to better preserve linguistic diversity.
　　Meanwhile, some people have already begun work on writing the Shanghai dialect. Zheng Xiaojun, a 30-year-old Shanghai man, started developing a computer interface for Shanghai dialect in 2006. On August 1, 2008, Zheng finished the input software and uploaded it online for people to download for free. Within five hours, more than 3,000 people downloaded the software.
　　Cai Zhiliang, a 65-year-old participant in Shanghai’s dialect recording program, is happy to see young people’s strong interest in the Shanghai dialect. But Cai’s grandson, who has studied in downtown Shanghai since he was 6 years old, only speaks Mandarin. “I am a bit worried for the new generation and I am afraid the local dialect will die out,” Cai said.
　　 The Cantonese dispute
　　 In June 2011, the CPPCC Municipal Committee of Guangzhou, capital of south China’s Guangdong Province, conducted a survey to see if alleged moves by the Guangzhou TV Station to switch to Mandarin would be popular.
　　The results stunned the committee: 80 percent of the respondents objected to the switch.
　　Chen Jianhua, Mayor of Guangzhou, has made clear that he intends to protect Cantonese. “We would rather sell the properties left by the forefathers than forget the language left by them,” said Chen at a press conference in January.
　　A local young man in his mid-20s, who refused to be identified, said he could never forget the slogan promoting Mandarin in his school years: “Speaking Mandarin is a respectful manner.”
　　“Am I not respectful when I speak in a dialect?” The Economic Observer, a Beijingbased business weekly, quoted him as saying.
　　Li Gongming, a cultural critic in Guangzhou, said, “In the past decades, Cantonese on the Chinese mainland has been losing its vividness and many words are disappearing. It is very hard to find an announcer or a presenter who speaks solid and genuine Cantonese in radio or on TV.”
　　However, it seems not all parents prefer their children to speak Cantonese. Fan Xin, an office worker in Guangzhou, prefers her son to speak Mandarin at home. “I think it is more useful,”Fan said. “I hope him to go to Beijing for university. If he cannot speak good Mandarin, he might not fit into campus life well. I think other people overreact about this issue.”
　　Dong Kun, a senior researcher with the Institute of Linguistics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, agrees with Fan. Dong finished his collage education in Guangzhou in the late 1970s. He left the city after graduation because many students from other cities were getting bullied by local students because they didn’t speak Cantonese well.
　　“An open society needs a standard language to help people with different backgrounds, while dialects often create distance between locals and migrants,” Dong said.
　　A professor at Beijing-based Renmin University of China, Yang Hongshan, also regards the disappearance of dialects as an unavoidable trend of a developing society.
　　“With the development of society and an increasing number of migrants, it is normal that more people speak standard language than regional dialects,” Yang said. “In a sense, a language disappears only when it loses its value to exist. If it is useful, it will come back to life by itself.”