Do you speak a dialect (方言) in daily life? While many Chinese people speak Mandarin ( 普通话)， some local dialects are in danger of disappearing. To save them, the Chinese government started the Chinese Language Resources Protection Project (中国语言资源保护工程) a few years ago.
This project looks at how people talk in 1, 712 places. Their languages include 103 dialects that are almost gone. It has helped China to build the largest language resource library in the world. There's an online library and people can learn dialects from over 5.6 million audio clips (音频) and over 5 million videos there.
Why is it important to protect the dialect culture? According to British linguist Harold Palmer, dialects are a key to storing (留存) local cultures. "Language can tell us a lot about a place's history, what people believe, and the biases of an area, he said.
Scholar Zhang Hongming expressed his worries about the disappearance of dialects. "For over 10 years, in areas such as Shanghai and Suzhou, children aged 6 to 15 can understand but hardly speak the Wu dialect, and young people above 15 years old sometimes speak it, but not very well. If this keeps happening, the dialect might disappear, " he said.
So how did China make this big library? "Many people across the country are working hard on this project to make it come true, " said Cao Zhiyun, chief expert on the project. Over five years, more than 350 universities and research groups joined in, along with over 4, 500 experts and more than 6, 000 dialect speakers.
The project is now moving into its second part. This includes creating digital tools like apps and mobile dictionaries to help people learn dialects.
