The Disappearing Dialect at the Heart of China’s Capital

My parents and grandparents are all from Beijing, and by 'from', I mean, born in and residents of for almost their entire lives. They are 'old Beijing', which despite what others may say in the comments, is becoming increasingly harder to find. While that makes me sad, it's the natural by-product of a city that has seen rapid, significant growth in the past decade; to hope otherwise would be naive. I grew up outside China but thanks to my parents I speak Chinese with what I'm often told is a Beijing accent, full of marbles and r's. It's a cultural marker and one that I'm proud of. I might not be able to speak the "tu hua" (transliterally, dirt speech), full of colourful vernacular and vocabulary only a native Beijinger would know, which is what I *think* this author was trying to get at, but whenever I hear an increasing rare phrase or two of it on the street, it's a wonderful throwback.

This is a great article, but there seems to be some confusion not only about the difference between dialects and accents, but also dialects and languages. The linked Reuters article from which the inference that "many" of "nearly 100 Chinese dialects" are spoken by China's 55 recognized ethnic minorities actually states that there are over 100 _languages_ spoken by China's ethnic minorities. Clearly many of these languages, like Tibetan and Uyghur, are not Chinese, while at the same time, many ethnic minorities like the Hui will speak the Chinese dialect or accent of their community or nearby population centers, like Chengdu or Kunming for instance, which would have nothing to do with their ethnicity. Further complicating these distinctions is Cantonese which, when I referred to it once as a "dialect" I was sternly corrected by a venerable historical linguist of Chinese who insisted that Cantonese is a language apart from Putonghua. I didn't pursue the issue, but this might also apply to other "dialects" like Shanghainese. The article is clearly about Beijing dialect, but the 100 number from the UN seems to be of languages spoken in China, not dialects.

By the way, in addition to the project to save Beijinghua, there has since about 2013 been a great international project of preserving all of China's dialects and languages by recording them and posting the recordings to an online interactive map, a kind of digital oral history of China's languages. www.phonemica.net.

While we are lamenting the loss of Chinese dialects, we should not forget that the greatest insult to the Chinese language has already occurred. Although well intention, the simplification of the characters had resulted in a significant loss of the meaning and beauty to the characters. We now get a bowl of "face" (面) when we want a bowl of noddles (麵) and love without a heart (爱 instead of 愛). What a pity!

Who cares? That only creates bigger problem, the so called "divide & conquer." It separates & discriminates people from different places. A big country like China with 56 ethnic groups is already tough enough to manage, why adds the local speaking tones to the already big problem? I am sure every Chinese province has its own speaking tones. Just image if US speaks 50 different tones (or pronunciation), one for each state, how could people communicate with each other? Even without language barrier, California has succession petition after every election to be independent from US. Isn't that bad enough? Why tests China?

This phenomenon isn't only happening in Beijing. Shanghai is the same - ten years ago most people there could communicate in standard "putonghua" Mandarin but spoke Shanghainese among themselves. We spent this summer in Shanghai with our grade school children, who quickly found new friends in the local community playground. Much to my surprise, the local kids all spoke Mandarin among themselves, not Shanghainese. Their grandparents, summoning them home to dinner, would call out in Shanghainese. It's not hard to surmise that language diversity in China is dying.

It sounds like New York - I can't remember the last time I heard a classic New York accent... I miss it!

The small silver lining for foreigners in china is that because there is no fully standard accent and pronounciation, it's actually possible as a foreigner to speak better mandarin than many of the natives. The best chinese is CCTV (like BBC for British). But few Chinese can speak with that accent especially those over 45. But if you work hard as a foreigner you can.

I studied Chinese at Harvard, where they teach Beijinghua. Looking back, it seems silly to me that we learned an accent that was so specific to one place. I didn't know at the time that this was the case, but my Chinese friends would often smirk at my accent, which seemed quaint to them. I'm curious if Beijinghua is usually taught in American universities.

As an American who's recently moved to Beijing, from my experience, I have no doubt that the Beijing accent is losing the primacy that it once had here as language becomes standardized across the country with China's modernization.

That being said, even with my limited Mandarin abilities, it's still quite easy to pick out a Beijing accent (the ending of almost every word seems to be pronounced like "arrr"... "Dongzhimarrr" instead of "Dongzhimen"), and I still come into contact with speakers very regularly, particularly Beijing taxi drivers. I would say the article exaggerates the extent to which you no longer hear it spoken. I still come in contact with it every day.

Nonetheless, while there seems to be a general ambivalence here about the general loss of diversity with the drive towards modernization, it's refreshing to see evidence that this attitude is beginning to change. I've noticed that many more people here are becoming concerned about the increasing homogeneity of Chinese cities, and the erasure of aspects like dialects and local architecture that make places unique. Now only if the Chinese government will also begin to pick up on these changing attitudes.

Growing up in Beijing, I never care much about Beijing Hua (is that a dialect or accent?). It was a telltale sign of someone from poor neighborhoods. An accent of common flower girls. Neither did I care about my grandma's dilapidated courtyard in hutong without flush toilet or central heating.

Now I am living in a modern apartment in Chaoyang, the new Beijing. I cannot stop telling my kids about their Beijing root. But they could not care less. Everywhere I travel in China, cities cannot wait to race to erase their uniqueness. Suzhou covered their canals with 4-lane highways. Shanghai bulldozed their shikumen houses with office blocks. You can hardly find any famous noodle hawkers in central Chengdu. Charming part of Qingdao is a tourist trap....in fact, they look more like American mid-western cities. Why not complete with a Disney world?

I am still proud of my mild Beijing accent. But I don't think my kids will have it. Our cities are already homogenous. When we are curious about our heritage, we go visit newly built ancient style tourist village with live actors doing the folk dance while having a cafe latte at the Starbucks.

I have the impression that the author either has not lived in Beijing for very long, or does not speak very much with working class people who are natives of Beijing, or perhaps she does not often stray from the Chaoyang District of the city. In fact, millions of people continue to speak what she calls "Beijing dialect." Perhaps they simply choose not to speak it with the author, out of courtesy, because she is foreign.

The Beijing dialect, 二话，Is most often spoken "with a booming voice," which makes it easier to identify Beijingers as they travel in China and, even here, in Southern California.

普通话，Putonghua, the now standard Mandarin, is an artificial dialect not actually spoken the people. Like the British "RP," Putonghua an artificial, learned dialect and was not normally spoken in any locality.

I doubt 二话 is really disappearing. The Chinese are able to switch from their home dialect, or language, to almost standard Mandarin depending who they are speaking with. Despite being schooled in Putonghua, my spoken Chinese is a mixture of 普通话，二话， and 昆明话, makes life interesting!

China's leaders will realize soon enough that in their rush to modernize they have bulldozed into dust much that was unique about their country's regions. The building boom of the past 20 years, the most visible aspect of urban modernization, has efficiently (and lucratively) removed vast swathes of the city's traditional residential neighbourhoods. Although often dilapidated, unsanitary, and urgently in need of renovation, they were a vital and lively part of Beijing's urban fabric. Many saw them as inconvenient and embarrassingly old-fashioned - much like Beijinghua.

The article suggests that many newcomers believe in the economic and social advantages of Putonghua, but the world offers many examples of successful bilingual or even trilingual cities. The fading of the wonderfully jocular, informal dialect will further erode the connection to the city's heritage in theatre, song, and popular culture generally. By then it will be too late to reinvigorate what remains.

This gradual language death is all too familiar with me.

I was born in Guangdong, where Cantonese is the main dialect. My mother spoke Mandarin and my dad spoke Cantonese. When I was growing up, I almost always heard Cantonese on the streets, while mandarin was the language of instruction at school. If any dialect would survive in the long run, I was certain that it would be Cantonese.

However, due to the heavy migration into Guangdong in the past 10-20 years, Cantonese has been in steady decline. Now when I go back, almost all the people I encounter are unable to speak Cantonese. As well, the last remaining cantonese TV stations were shut down recently, and many schools are even cracking down on the use of cantonese in class with the intention of eliminating its use outright.

The mosaic of languages is one of the many things that makes China unique. I can only hope that it survives.

Thank you for the article. Could you direct me to more information about the dialect museum (name of museum and researchers in Chinese?). Are there online recordings, documents about characteristics of the dialects?

What about Shanghainese? A 6-tone dialect is far more interesting than a variation of 4-tone Mandarin! Yet language standardization in the last few years dealt a huge blow to it in younger population. It's only because of my parents that I preserved my Shanghainese heritage.

Many, many years ago the Beijing rrr was what I learned and felt smug at its superiority. Now I find that 北京語言 is declining, just as I am.

Though the standardization of language makes sense in today's economy, the more languages and dialects you know, the better it is for your brain (according to recent science news). If the average European can speak multiple languages, I find it hard to believe that Chinese students studying foreign languages, not be able to retain the dialects of their parents. I guess if it's not profitable nor useful, there's no point in learning them. I also imagine it has something to do with the Communist party indoctrinating the masses of what's considered proper, expediting domestic spying and eventual, albeit unintentional cultural genocide. I admire the Irish and Welsh for preserving and promoting their cultural heritage through bilingual education offerings. One can only hope in today's money-above-all-else world, we would want to retain some cultural connection to our ancestors, however impractical. If there's interest in Dothraki and Elven, surely interest in actual languages could be encouraged and preserved through movies/books/digital media.

So much has been lost in Beijing. When I first went to Beijing in 1981, there were craftsman neighborhoods where genuine handcrafted goods of high quality were to be found. A few years later they were gone, with shopping malls or high rise apartment buildings in their place. The hutongs (courtyard houses for extended families) have been going extinct, and almost all gone now. There was a book published I think in the 90's that I wish I had bought, that had wonderful photographic records of many of these wonderful buildings.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts has such a house from the Ming Dynasty, not from Beijing, but rather from SE China that is worth a trip, See it interactively at http://www.pem.org/sites/yinyutang/

Standardization of Chinese as a language is the trend and it is the result of adaptation to the fast pace of modern life. It may also help for non-Chinese speakers to learn Chinese. The Beijing (remember it is used to be called Peking?) Opera does preserve the elements of the Beijing dialect as a form of art, which can be rich materials for enthusiasts to study.

Fascinating.

Language is intertwined with culture to define an ethnic identity.

"Two people divided by a common language." Winston Churchill on the British and American of his parents.

Same thing's happening across the U.S. Lots of people move to New York but refuse to drink the "wudder."

I was a trade representative in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution and I had many meetings in Beijing. I remember one which took place at a Beijing duck restaurant at night. The host was a much older man who spoke with a very pronounced Beijing dialect. He actually sounded a bit like Jimmy Stewart, if Stewart were speaking Chinese and this gave me the feeling that I was in "old China" in some way. I was fluent in Chinese at the time, in Mandarin, or rather, putonghua as it's called in Chinese: the common language, and It wasn't all that difficult to understand him. Obviously he made quite an impression on me, as I recall him and how he sounded all these years later.

It is yet another sad development... the leadership is so unsure of itself on this file (and so inclined to believe the doctrinaire nonsense by its cultural commissars) that they actively suppress "non-standard" forms of speech.

Of course, language is always changing, in all cultural and political contexts. But imagine a situation in which New Yorkers were told that their particular patois was "backwards" or "not to be encouraged".

This is sad, even if it may be necessary for progress.

I'm not sure whether this article is distinguishing between languages and dialects. It has been conventional, though wrong, to refer to all forms of Chinese, from north to south, as "dialects" when many are simply different languages with the same writing system. When it says some minority ethnic groups are losing their dialects, I wonder why a minority ethnic group has a "dialect" rather than a "language".