China’s Dying Dialects: 2 Americans’ Mission to Preserve History

China’s Dying Dialects: 2 Americans’ Mission to Preserve History
Jul 11, 2013 By eChinacities.com

Editor’s note: this article was translated and edited from Ifeng.com, and looks at Phonemica, a website set up by two Americans that aims to document China’s many dialects via the use of recordings. The website depicts a map of China and encourages contributors to record stories in their own dialects. The site hopes to provide a comprehensive, accessible database of the many Chinese dialects in the near future.

21-year-old Miss Jiang is currently studying in Shanghai, and has lived in the city for three years. Despite being in Shanghai for a long time, Jiang still can’t comprehend much Shanghainese. When she speaks her home Changsha dialect however, she also has difficulty, and really only speaks standard Mandarin fluently (albeit with a Changsha accent). “I can’t do anything about it. From the first day at school we only speak Mandarin and I’m used to that.” China has a huge variety of different dialects, however due to the government’s emphasis on the use of standard Mandarin in schools and in general public places, these dialects are becoming increasingly difficult to preserve. In Shanghai for example, many of the younger generation of locals can’t speak Shanghainese as well as their ancestors, and this phenomenon is occurring throughout China.

However, two language-loving Americans are trying to do something about it. Kellen Parker and Steve Hansen began a project in 2009 where they and various contributors would make recordings of the many dialects that are in danger of dying out. This project later evolved into a website called Phoemica, or Xiangyinyuan (乡音苑).

. Light and dark green depicts standard Mandarin (with different accents), yellow is Hakka, blue is Hokkien, orange is Wu Chinese, dark brown is Xiang Chinese, red is Gan Chinese, purple is Cantonese, and light brown is Jin Chinese.

Kellen Parker is a linguistics graduate student at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University, and mostly studies Chinese dialects and their development through history. Before embarking on his studies, Parker lived around the Yangtze River basin and it was there that he got the inspiration to set up Chinese language resource website Sinoglot. Steve Hansen, as well as being fluent in Chinese, also speaks Spanish, Korean and Latvian. He has also lived in Beijing for many years, and has conducted interviews for Phonemica regarding the topic of Chinese dialects. He believes that in Beijing, there is a lack of knowledge of the various dialects of China. “Beijingers are like New Yorkers,” jokes Hansen, “they think they’re the center of the world.” In lieu of this, one could say that Beijingers view people who speak accented Mandarin as speakers of “another dialect”.       

Recordings detail a whole host of different stories and dialects

One thing you’re bound to notice on the Phonemica website is the presence of a large map which depicts various dialects across China. In certain areas, there are uploads of recordings of dialects which visitors to the site can listen to. Upon clicking on the recording, you can find out some information about the person behind the voice such as their name, age, native dialect and dialect being spoken on the recording. Most of the recordings feature speakers telling a story in their various dialects, and are around five minutes long. The website went live in April 2013, and currently there are already around 85 recordings. People of all ages from different backgrounds have used their dialects to discuss a whole host of topics such as their favorite Chinese celebrity or their memories of working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.      

One contributor, 61-year-old Mr Xie who hails from Pingdong County in Taiwan, used his own variant of Hakka to tell a story. Parker states that there are around 30 million people who speak Hakka as their mother tongue, though there are obviously significantly fewer who speak Xie’s variant of the language, and are mostly based in the northwest of Taiwan. Another contributor, 50-year-old Song Hongcheng from Fang County, Hubei, also told a story using his own local dialect. The dialect of Fang County is a branch of Zhongyuan Mandarin (a dialect spoken in central Shaanxi, Henan, and southern Shandong), and there are currently around 300,000 speakers of the dialect. When the website first went online, it received recordings from across China from various volunteers, and in the last week, has received dialect recordings from Baoji, Shaanxi, Xinhua, Hunan, and Gaoping, Shanxi.  

Inspirations and the future         

The website derives from George Mason University’s Speech Accent Archive, which was set up to document the different accents of English speakers across the world. Parker and Hansen were also inspired by Story Corps, a website that features over 45,000 recordings of stories from people all over the world. Currently, Phonemica relies heavily on the voluntary work of netizens, and recruits volunteers via various social networking sites. Users are allowed to upload their recordings and translate and edit the transcripts themselves. Hansen predicts that in the future, the website will see contributions from overseas Chinese communities across the world. “The map on the homepage of the website doesn’t depict China’s borders, and with this we have aroused the interest of overseas Chinese regarding how they speak their language,” comments Hansen. Although most of the current recordings come from China’s eastern costal area, Hansen thinks that Chinese speakers from places such as Singapore and Mongolia will also contribute their stories to the project.

There are also many other similar websites in China that detail China’s dialects, however these are mostly in the form of text. There are barely any that feature actual recordings of the dialects, and are more focused towards professional use and research as opposed to Phonemica’s collection of recordings from ordinary people. Parker adds, “Basically, we are simply recording Chinese people speaking from their homes. Afterwards, we’re going to analyze these recordings; the findings of which we will display in a database.” By asking people to tell their stories in their own dialects, Parker states, “We’re also helping to create an oral history of Asia.” Next to each recording, the website will also detail the speaker’s ethnic background, photo, hometown and education among other things, which makes the project look much more interesting and friendly than most other language research websites.
 

Source: Ifeng

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Keywords: Chinese dialects China’s dialects Phonemica

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