Yue (Ivy) Blog #3: "What language do you speak?"

I did not speak English seven years ago, when I first arrived in the US.  When I first came here, I remember how I blushed, turning tomato-red at the mere thought of having to greet someone in the hallway. Often I would defer to a distant head bob. I had to take one-year of ESL (English as Second Language) in high school. Prior to that, I spent most of my life in Shanghai, China. My native tone is Shanghainese, the dialect of Shanghai. However, Shanghainese is banned at schools in Shanghai by the government. Only the official Chinese language, Mandarin Chinese (or Putonghua), is allowed. After a brief Internet search, I came across this interesting information. During the Cultural Revolution in China, the government decided to simplify traditional characters and make the Beijing dialog the only official language and named it Putonghua (“common language”). So ever since I entered elementary school, I was taught to feel ashamed if I spoke Shanghainese, even if by accident. Everything at school is taught in Putonghua, which made it much harder on elder teachers, who spoke only Shanghainese when they were young, and learned Mandarin later. When I was little, there were a few TV programs in Shanghainese on TV; nevertheless, nowadays, there are almost none. Shanghainese is fading away; many young people nowadays do not know how to speak Shanghainese in Shanghai. Shanghai as a harbor city, exported a lot of culture, as well as, human capital, all around the world in the past 100 hundred years. Many of the second/third generation immigrants only speak Shanghainese as their main dialect. I’ve even heard people speaking Shanghainese at the Prime Outlets, here in Williamsburg. But in China, Shanghainese will surely go extinct and with it, a vast array of cultural and regional diversity that once existed.  I want to end with a quote that I like from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: “If every language is acquirable, its acquisition requires a real portion of a person’s life: each new conquest is measured against shortening days. What limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness but one’s own mortality. Hence a certain privacy to all languages.”