I, like many bright-eyed foreigners who arrive in Shanghai, planned on spending my time here learning Mandarin Chinese. After all, there are more Mandarin speakers here than in any other city in the world. We either enroll in a Mandarin course or hire a tutor so we can communicate while we are here and broaden our job skills for after we move on. We’ve all heard a million times that Mandarin will be the most essential language of the 21st century. But what we all learn soon after we get here is that Shanghai has a language of its own. Anyone who’s been in a crowded Shanghai elevator pressed up against another person shouting “hao va” (alright?) repeatedly into a cell phone knows that on the streets, in the noodle shops and on these crowded elevators, most Chinese in Shanghai are not speaking the same language we read in our Mandarin books or hear on our Chinese podcasts. It’s a dialect unfamiliar to even the most dedicated Chinese learner. It’s a dialect spoken between locals. It’s Shanghainese. The Shanghai dialect is somewhat similar to Yiddish in that it is a language that is dying with every generation. Shanghainese can also be compared to the Barcelona dialect Catalan in that all of its speakers also speak Mandarin similar to how Catalonians all speak Spanish. But the comparison I like most is the Shanghai dialect and Ebonics, or as some linguists like to call, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). While technically, Shanghainese and AAVE are derivatives of Mandarin and English respectively, most people who speak standard Chinese and English cannot understand what the hell the speakers of these dialects are saying. As many educators, psychologists and linguists in America have sought to legitimize AAVE as a dialect with linguistic patterns and rules, so too in Shanghai, there exists a movement to preserve and validate the local tongue. Since Mao’s revolution in 1949 and the subsequent wave of nationalism, regional dialects were banned from schools and literature in favor of the national dialect, Mandarin. The Shanghai Daily reported Friday that the first ever Shanghainese dictionary will be published in August. A former Shanghai University professor has compiled 15,000 words and phrases from the Shanghai dialect, or Shanghai hua, that will incorporate both Chinese characters and pinyin, the English transliteration of the sounds. For a language that is hundreds of years old and is spoken by 14 million people, it’s high time for a dictionary. Linguists plan to use the new dictionary as the basis for language input software that could be used for translation and online dictionaries. The Daily reports that an online version of the Shanghainese dictionary will be available by year’s end. Which means that in a few months time, when you find yourself in another crammed elevator with locals shouting into cell phones, if you are wondering what that non-Mandarin word you hear means, you can pick up your new Shanghainese dictionary and look it up. Hao va?

•Shanghai Daily: Local Tongue Finally Gets Own Dictionary
•Wikipedia: "Shanghainese"

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