Shanghai subway gets tongue-tied over dialect plan

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The Shanghai government has told the city's subway operators to ditch a plan to use five Chinese dialects to serve customers, saying only the official tongue Mandarin can be used, state media reported.

The subway company had wanted to use the dialects at a station used by many migrant workers to speed up ticket sales and offer basic information, the Xinmin Evening News said.

But that violates China's language law, which demands the use of Mandarin in public, it said.

"The city language commission has already got in touch with the subway and demanded that it pays closer attention to using Mandarin," the report added.

China has been pushing Mandarin, the language of education, broadcast and government, for decades to get everyone speaking the same language in a country with many mutually unintelligible dialects.

The government, keen to promote racial unity, has taken a hard line on the public use of dialects. In 2004 it banned the broadcast of "Tom and Jerry" cartoons dubbed into Shanghainese. But only half the population can actually speak Mandarin, according to government surveys, due to poor levels of education in China's vast countryside.