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In 2007, Fujian TV Station started to offer some news programs in Hokkien, which originates from south Fujian. "Local people always asked us why we don't have any programs in Hokkien and I think if we don't do anything about it, fewer and fewer people will be able to understand and speak our local language," Chen said.
Liu Xiaoyu, a 7-year-old boy from Quanzhou City in Fujian can speak very fluent Mandarin but has a poor command of Hokkien. "We speak Mandarin in school. Teachers told us if we spoke Hokkien, that would have a bad influence on our pronunciation of Mandarin," Liu said.
For Huang Xiaoliang, a member of the Fujian Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the local advisory body, Hokkien is not just a dialect, but contains cultural features.
Huang said that Hokkien keeps the pronunciation of ancient Chinese. "If you read a poem from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in Hokkien, it sounds more pleasant than reading it in Mandarin. Local operas, which are usually performed in dialects, are another part of the culture that should be preserved along with local languages," he said.
Efforts to preserve local dialects are also underway in Shanghai. In March 2011, linguists in Shanghai started to recruit volunteers to record all branches of the Shanghai dialect for archival purposes.
"We don't know how our ancestors spoke during the Ming (1368-1644) or Qing dynasties (1644-1911). We can only find some expressions from novels or other written records. The vocal database uses modern technology to record voices which our descendents will be able to listen to," said You Rujie, a professor at the Chinese Language and Literature Department of Fudan University in Shanghai.
The database in Shanghai is the third of its kind in China. Similar databases have also been set up in Jiangsu and Yunnan provinces to better preserve linguistic diversity.
Meanwhile, some people have already begun work on writing the Shanghai dialect. Zheng Xiaojun, a 30-year-old Shanghai man, started developing a computer interface for Shanghai dialect in 2006. On August 1, 2008, Zheng finished the input software and uploaded it online for people to download for free. Within five hours, more than 3,000 people downloaded the software.
Cai Zhiliang, a 65-year-old participant in Shanghai's dialect recording program, is happy to see young people's strong interest in the Shanghai dialect. But Cai's grandson, who has studied in downtown Shanghai since he was 6 years old, only speaks Mandarin. "I am a bit worried for the new generation and I am afraid the local dialect will die out," Cai said.
In June 2011, the CPPCC Municipal Committee of Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, conducted a survey to see if alleged moves by the Guangzhou TV Station to switch to Mandarin would be popular.
The results stunned the committee: 80 percent of the respondents objected to the switch.
Chen Jianhua, Mayor of Guangzhou, has made clear that he intends to protect Cantonese. "We would rather sell the properties left by the forefathers than forget the language left by them," said Chen at a press conference in January.
A local young man in his mid-20s, who refused to be identified, said he could never forget the slogan promoting Mandarin in his school years: "Speaking Mandarin is a respectful manner."
"Am I not respectful when I speak in a dialect?" The Economic Observer, a Beijing-based business weekly, quoted him as saying.
Li Gongming, a cultural critic in Guangzhou, said, "In the past decades, Cantonese on the Chinese mainland has been losing its vividness and many words are disappearing. It is very hard to find an announcer or a presenter who speaks solid and genuine Cantonese in radio or on TV."
However, it seems not all parents prefer their children to speak Cantonese. Fan Xin, an office worker in Guangzhou, prefers her son to speak Mandarin at home. "I think it is more useful," Fan said. "I hope him to go to Beijing for university. If he cannot speak good Mandarin, he might not fit into campus life well. I think other people overreact about this issue."
Dong Kun, a senior researcher with the Institute of Linguistics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, agrees with Fan. Dong finished his collage education in Guangzhou in the late 1970s. He left the city after graduation because many students from other cities were getting bullied by local students because they didn't speak Cantonese well.
"An open society needs a standard language to help people with different backgrounds, while dialects often create distance between locals and migrants," Dong said.
A professor at Beijing-based Renmin University of China, Yang Hongshan, also regards the disappearance of dialects as an unavoidable trend of a developing society.
"With the development of society and an increasing number of migrants, it is normal that more people speak standard language than regional dialects," Yang said. "In a sense, a language disappears only when it loses its value to exist. If it is useful, it will come back to life by itself."
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