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Across China: Recording the diversity of China's local dialects

Xinhua, April 16, 2016 Adjust font size:

Sitting in front of the recorder, Xie Liangcai, 75, straightened his back, cleared his throat, and started to read a nursery rhyme in his local dialect.

Xie, a retired primary school teacher who lives in Changsha City, Hunan Province, has been chosen for a program to preserve local tongues of the province.

"They want the quality of the recordings to be very good, and sometimes I get a bit tongue-tied," he said.

With backing of around 4.65 million yuan (718,425 U. S. dollars), the five to 10 year project will record the dialects spoken in 57 different parts of Hunan, and compile a report made up of text, audio and video material.

The organizer, Hunan TV presenter Wang Han, said, "Our dialects are something that distinguishes us. They are unique to use and an essential part of our local culture. It is very important that we have a record of them all."

Since July 2015, when the project was launched, researchers have finished recording dialects in 15 chosen sites in the province and over 60 Chinese and foreign scholars have taken part in the research.

China has various local dialects, and they vary a lot from region to region.

As the country has been promoting Mandarin for decades and many people are leaving their home towns for big cities during the process of urbanization, some dialects are on the verge of extinction.

Besides Wang's project, the province is also involved in a national dialect cataloging campaign.

The national language resources protection project, officially launched in May 2015, has completed the recording of 81 ethnic minority languages and 53 local dialects of Han ethnicity, according to Tian Lixin, an official with the Ministry of Education.

She said the dialects of 1,500 sites across the country will be investigated within five years. With plans to collect local dialects and languages of ethnic minority groups, and construct a multi-media language database, the project will better protect the country's rich and varied languages.

Liu Danqing, director of the language research institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the diversity of languages is an important aspect of people's social life.

Official and community-led language research programs are very important as they will not only protect the inheritance of dialects, but also help cultivate linguistic talent, Liu said. Endi