Short Blog 4 — Comment on Alicia Wang’s Long Blog 1
Hi Alicia, I am glad how you write about the Chinese dialects. It is not only a dialect but the precipitation of the four thousand years of Chinese culture. It’s always great to explore our own culture with other people. Let people from different cultures get to know our own culture.
I am shocked that how these dialects are disappearing in this fast phase. Interesting to know how almost every native people over the age of 60 can speak their own dialect, and especially in Hangzhou only 9.2% of the younger generation can speak the dialect.
Me personally am from Suzhou which in the second graph got the less percentage of the younger generation knowing how to speak the dialect. Your writing really gets me to want to learn my own dialect right now. Same as your writing, before I entered school I could speak my dialect fluently. But since the school ask us to speak mandarin, I barely speak our own dialect.
Furthermore, I do think that the loss of the local dialects is the disappearance of the local culture. Protect our own dialect is protecting our own culture.
