By Wang Zhiyong

Thousands of native dialects have fallen into decline since China started the "Popularizing Putonghua" campaign in 1956. The decline has been accelerated by the booming economy and other developments in society.

To "rescue" the dialects, the National Language Committee is making efforts to build a database of Chinese dialects. The initial pilot program was launched on October 11, 2008 in Suzhou, a historical east-China city famed for its classical gardens.

To cover the nation's first pilot city in the project, three teams will be dispatched to downtown Suzhou, Changshu and Kunshan for field recording of original dialects there. The teams comprise experts from Nanjing University, Nanjing Normal University and Suzhou University. The ultimate goal of this project is to set up a national dialect map with multi-media rendering.

Suzhou enjoys a long history, and its euphemistical dialect is renowned for its softness and mild tone, rich in adjectives and mood words.

However, the Suzhou dialect is also facing a crisis. A local mother told the Yangtze Evening News that her daughter has used only Putonghua since she started at primary school, and now talks to her parents and classmates only in Putonghua. "She even thinks in Putonghua," said the mother.

With the increased mobility of the population, the increasing popularity of television, and developments in education, dialects have an increasing struggle to maintain their "original ecology."

Authentic native dialects will be spoken by fewer young people, and their residue will inevitably be altered as time passes, experts said.

Men preferable to women for dialect compilation

Many factors contribute to the right choice of dialect speakers, such as age and educational background. The right individual must be a native who grew up in a family with a simple and pure linguistic environment, and he must never have been resident in other places.

The audio recording, including voice, vocabulary, grammar, and speaking of sentences, is limited to men.

Men - superior to women in dialect acquisition? "This is mainly due to married women customarily moving to the place of residence of their husbands, and this transfer of location will tend to alter a woman's original dialect. So the move is to ensure that the dialect samples have 'purity of descent'," explained Cao Zhiyun, an expert in Chinese dialects from Beijing Language and Culture University.　　

Every county will be sampled

"We have no way of knowing how the people of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) recited the then greatest poets in its golden age," Cao acknowledged. He said that the most basic function of the "vocal" dialect database is to record the contemporary state of national dialects and minority languages in early 21st century.

China had carried out a general investigation of Chinese dialects and minority languages in the 1950s, but this was limited to the then conditions and many shortcomings existed in the processes of data collation, publication and preservation. For example, no audio records were preserved.

The audio dialect map project will be implemented throughout the country and the sample density will be detailed to every county nationwide. In addition to audio records, pictures and video clips will also be saved, together with other supporting information. After further scientific analysis and processing, the data will be preserved for future language policy-making as well as in-depth research and study.

(China.org.cn October 14, 2008)