China to survey dialects to better protect them

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will next year survey the thousands of dialects spoken in the country with an eye to protecting ones which are threatened with extinction, a state newspaper said on Tuesday.

The survey will also look at the influence of dialects on Mandarin, the official national language, and set up a database to record them, the China Daily said, quoting Li Yuming, deputy head of the state language affairs committee.

A focus will be the Shanghai dialect, "as it is one of the most popular", the report said.

"As more and more young people in Shanghai use the dialect to communicate online, and as its vocabulary expands, it will be standardised and promoted as a distinct local language," the newspaper added.

It did not say which dialects were on the verge of vanishing, but some languages spoken by small ethnic minorities such as the Hezhe and Oroqen are now spoken by very few people, the young having switched to Chinese.

Linguists say that many of what the Chinese government calls dialects -- such as Shanghainese and Cantonese -- are actually separate languages, with distinct words and grammar.

While they share a common writing system -- although some dialect words cannot be written in standard Chinese -- they are generally mutually incomprehensible.

The government estimates that only half the population can actually speak Mandarin, despite decades of intensive efforts to promote it as a form of social cohesion in the world's most populous country.

It has previously taken a tough line on the public use of dialects, which has now been relaxed somewhat.