When the first television news programme in Shanghainese launched late last month, many Shanghai residents welcomed the broadcast as an overdue jolt of support for a dying dialect.
But linguists and cultural experts say the 20-minute programme, Xin Wen Fang (News Workshop), which airs every Saturday evening, must be accompanied by a broader campaign to revive the dialect.
Cheng Naishan, a writer specialising in Shanghai's history and culture, said she hoped Xin Wen Fang becomes a daily broadcast. 'I hope there are more TV programmes in the Shanghai dialect,' she said. 'Dialect is the carrier of culture. Without dialect, local culture will also disappear.'
For the past two decades, many Shanghai residents have eschewed the dialect as almost no one outside the metropolis understands it. Even fluency in Putonghua is of little help because Shanghainese uses such different tones and vocabulary.
A study by the city's Academy of Social Sciences last month looked at the language habits of 21 primary school classes and 24 junior middle-school classes. It found only 60 per cent of pupils able to speak Shanghainese, the Shanghai Morning Post reports.
Qian Nairong, a professor of linguistics at Shanghai University, said the true picture was gloomier. His own observations of urban primary schools showed that one to two pupils out of an average class of 30 were fluent in the dialect.
