The most beautiful language you've never heard

Shanghainese!

I came across this the other night and was entranced.  To my (untrained) ear, it sounds very different from Putonghua (Mandarin) and at times like a cross between Chinese and Japanese.

There's an ongoing debate as to whether Shanghainese and other forms of Chinese are "dialects" or "languages". Some are mutually unintelligible and differ from each other to a greater extent than, say, French and Italian.

As part of the effort to impose Putonghua as the national language, Shanghainese has been systematically repressed, and even today the local government is exhorting citizens to "be modern" and abandon their mother tongue. Even so, the number of people speaking it is equivalent to the population of some European countries.

Interesting background information and resources here.

9:56:42 AM   |