Many bright-eyed foreigners who arrive in Shanghai plan to devote hours each day to the concentrated study of Mandarin Chinese. After all, we've all heard that Mandarin will be the most essential language of the 21st century, and what better place to learn than the city that houses more Mandarin speakers than any other in the world? So, we eagerly enroll in a Mandarin course or hire a tutor, suspecting that our dedication and natural smarts will have us exchanging pleasantries with locals in six months.

So why is it, after months and months of study and diligent memorization of tones and pinyin, we walk into a filled-to-capacity Shanghai elevator, hear all the natives shouting "hao va" ("alright") into their cell phones, and feel as clueless as the day we arrived at Pudong Airport?

The answer is Shangahainese.

On the streets, in the noodle shops, at the office, most Chinese in Shanghai don't converse in the language we read in our Mandarin texts or hear on our Chinese podcasts. Shanghainese is a dialect unfamiliar to even the most dedicated Chinese learner. It's a dialect spoken between locals.

The Shanghai dialect is comparable to Yiddish in that it is a language that is dying with each passing generation. Because of Mao's Revolution and the subsequent wave of nationalism, Shanghainese and other regional dialects were banned from schools and literature in favor of the national dialect, Mandarin.

One could also compare Shanghainese to Catalan, a dialect spoken by Barcelona natives who also speak Spanish.

But there lies a more appealing comparison between the Shanghai dialect and Ebonics, or what some linguists refer to as African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Technically, Shanghainese and AAVE are derivatives of Mandarin and English respectively. However, most people who speak standard Chinese and English are hard-pressed to deduce what speakers of these dialects are saying. Many educators, psychologists and linguists in America have sought to legitimize AAVE as a dialect with linguistic patterns and rules. Similarly, in Shanghai, a movement to preserve and validate the local tongue is on the rise.

The Shanghai Daily reported that the first ever Shanghainese dictionary will be published in August. A former Shanghai University professor has compiled 15,000 words and phrases from the Shanghai dialect, or Shanghai hua, that will incorporate Chinese characters and pinyin.

The language is hundreds of years old and spoken by about 14 million people. It's high time for a dictionary.

Linguists plan to use the new dictionary as the basis for language input software that could be used for translation and online dictionaries. The Daily reports that an online version of the Shanghainese dictionary will be available by year's end. All this means that in a few months time, when you find yourself in another crammed elevator with locals hollering into cell phones, and your natural curiosity makes you yearn for the meaning of that non-Mandarin word you just heard, you can flip open your new Shanghainese dictionary and look it up. Hao va?

-David Flumenbaum


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