Shanghainese - the overview
The Shanghainese dialect. Does it have a future? Can it - should it?? - ever gain a position on a par even with Cantonese and Taiwanese? Who knows? But one thing's for sure - out there on the streets of China's largest city, it is basically Shanghainese that is spoken, that makes the metropolis run, not Mandarin.
The language is very different in pronunciation from Mandarin and Cantonese, there are several sounds that are not found in any other Chinese dialect. The bulk of the vocabulary is the same, but there's lots of variations and unique words and phrases. Like any dialect rooted in one place, it has more colour and richness than an official compromise language such as Mandarin.
Shanghainese is part of the Wu dialect family, one of the five dialect groups into which Chinese can be divided (the others are northern Chinese including Mandarin, Cantonese, the Fujian dialects and Hakka / Kejia). The Wu dialect covers a vast area of eastern China - the whole extended Yangtse River delta - and includes lots of variations in even the most basic words, like I, we, you. There is quite a lot of classical opera-type culture in the Wu dialect - there's "Huju" - Shanghainese opera, and pingtan - the story-telling / singing of Suzhou. There were a couple of novels written in Shanghainese around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries but the experiment was not viewed as successful, and they have sunk without trace with no follow-up.
Which is not surprising considering the overall opinion of Shanghainese people towards their own language (a wise man once said, by the way, that the difference between and a language and a dialect is that a language has an army and a navhy). Getting Shanghainese people to treat Shanghainese seriously is not an easy task. They often describe it as ugly, rough and uncultured. Definitely unsuitable for pop singing, for instance.
One Shanghainese lady, someone highly (overly?) educated outside her place of birth, told me recently that it was impossible to hold a conversation in Shanghainese on a weighty subject - the meaning of life, the future of the Internet, the derivation of the name Haagen-Dazs, things like that. It has to be done in Mandarin, she said. Other Shanghainese I tried this line on poo-poo-ed it. But it seems to be representative of a sense of inferiority that surrounds the language/dialect.
Take music, for instance. I do. All the time.
There are countless kara-oke bars and halls in Shanghai. They have musical selections consisting of thousands of Mandarin tunes and hundreds of others in Cantonese, Taiwanese, English, and Japanese. Shanghainese kara-oke fans love to sing songs in Cantonese, even though they can't speak it. But how about a kara-oke song in Shanghainese? Sorry, Mmm-mat-le.
In Cantonese, you can watch old movies where they speak basically like they do today. There are no old movies in Shanghainese. Even back in the 1930s, they made movies in Shanghai with Mandarin soundtracks. There is Cantonese pop music - it's been going strong for 20 years now, and it's heard far beyond the borders of Hong Kong or even Guangdong province. There is effectively no Shanghainese pop music. In the popular magazines and newspapers of Hong Kong, you will find a written form of Cantonese (barbaric though it looks). Such a thing hardly exists in Shanghainese. Lastly, Cantonese can be heard on radio and on TV, on videos and laser discs. In Shanghai - effectively nothing. It's all Mandarin by government decree.
Very strange.
The Shanghainese dialect. Does it have a future? Can it - should it?? - ever gain a position on a par even with Cantonese and Taiwanese? Who knows? But one thing's for sure - out there on the streets of China's largest city, it is basically Shanghainese that is spoken, that makes the metropolis run, not Mandarin.
The language is very different in pronunciation from Mandarin and Cantonese, there are several sounds that are not found in any other Chinese dialect. The bulk of the vocabulary is the same, but there's lots of variations and unique words and phrases. Like any dialect rooted in one place, it has more colour and richness than an official compromise language such as Mandarin.
Shanghainese is part of the Wu dialect family, one of the five dialect groups into which Chinese can be divided (the others are northern Chinese including Mandarin, Cantonese, the Fujian dialects and Hakka / Kejia). The Wu dialect covers a vast area of eastern China - the whole extended Yangtse River delta - and includes lots of variations in even the most basic words, like I, we, you. There is quite a lot of classical opera-type culture in the Wu dialect - there's "Huju" - Shanghainese opera, and pingtan - the story-telling / singing of Suzhou. There were a couple of novels written in Shanghainese around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries but the experiment was not viewed as successful, and they have sunk without trace with no follow-up.
Which is not surprising considering the overall opinion of Shanghainese people towards their own language (a wise man once said, by the way, that the difference between and a language and a dialect is that a language has an army and a navhy). Getting Shanghainese people to treat Shanghainese seriously is not an easy task. They often describe it as ugly, rough and uncultured. Definitely unsuitable for pop singing, for instance.
One Shanghainese lady, someone highly (overly?) educated outside her place of birth, told me recently that it was impossible to hold a conversation in Shanghainese on a weighty subject - the meaning of life, the future of the Internet, the derivation of the name Haagen-Dazs, things like that. It has to be done in Mandarin, she said. Other Shanghainese I tried this line on poo-poo-ed it. But it seems to be representative of a sense of inferiority that surrounds the language/dialect.
Take music, for instance. I do. All the time.
There are countless kara-oke bars and halls in Shanghai. They have musical selections consisting of thousands of Mandarin tunes and hundreds of others in Cantonese, Taiwanese, English, and Japanese. Shanghainese kara-oke fans love to sing songs in Cantonese, even though they can't speak it. But how about a kara-oke song in Shanghainese? Sorry, Mmm-mat-le.
In Cantonese, you can watch old movies where they speak basically like they do today. There are no old movies in Shanghainese. Even back in the 1930s, they made movies in Shanghai with Mandarin soundtracks. There is Cantonese pop music - it's been going strong for 20 years now, and it's heard far beyond the borders of Hong Kong or even Guangdong province. There is effectively no Shanghainese pop music. In the popular magazines and newspapers of Hong Kong, you will find a written form of Cantonese (barbaric though it looks). Such a thing hardly exists in Shanghainese. Lastly, Cantonese can be heard on radio and on TV, on videos and laser discs. In Shanghai - effectively nothing. It's all Mandarin by government decree.
Very strange.
2楼2010-05-25 12:50收起回复
