62 percent of Chinese speak a local dialect, says survey

A survey released on Thursday has shone light on Chinese attitudes towards local dialects.

According to the survey conducted by China Youth Daily and Chinese survey website Wenjuan.com, 62.8 percent of the 2,002 respondents said that they speak their local dialect. 8.7 percent cannot speak it but can understand, while 2.1 percent are unable to do both.

More than 70 percent of Chinese people believe that younger generation should learn dialects.

65.8 percent of respondents believe that dialects are a link to the history and culture of locales, while 24.6 percent admitted they had encountered discrimination for using dialects.

The respondents blamed television programmes (68.8 percent), human migration (60.2 percent) and urbanisation (36.4 percent) for the decreasing numbers of Chinese speaking their local dialects.

In this survey, dialects refer to the seven main dialects of Chinese: Guan, Wu, Yue (Cantonese), Min, Hakka, Xiang and Gan, and didn't include dialects of ethnic minority languages.

The Chinese government began to promote Mandarin as the national language in 1955 and it is widely used on television programming, in schools and between people from different regions.

(GBTIMES)