Time to Protect Dialects from Extinction
Zheng Yefu

Men of conscience do not condone the notion that animals can be hunted and killed at will provided a few dozen species are kept, or a few hundred at the most. Nor do they watch with folded arms when animals are left to die out after losing their fair share of living space to mankind.

Paradoxically, human beings are behaving as if they were prepared to keep only a few dozen majority languages, even though they do not profess to get rid of minority languages and dialects. They have gone so far as to limit their use of languages to a few major ones, and have no qualms about literally helping majority languages lick up minority ones.

Why should animal species and languages be protected? Because, firstly, their right is at stake. Every species has the right to survival. Every minority community is entitled to use the language it has inherited from its ancestors, in many cases as the singular emblem of its ethnic identity. Secondly, protecting species is as conducive to wildlife and mankind as safeguarding dialects is to languages. Cultures are reposed and accumulated in languages. Cultural diversity entails linguistic diversity. A sound ecosystem is predicated on diversity, and diversity offers the ecosystem alternatives to adapt itself to the changing environment in very much the same way as a country woman chooses not to put all her eggs in one single basket, even if it makes things a little inconvenient for her.

It is said that the Eskimo have over a thousand words for snow. The Mongolia language has a boundless vocabulary when it comes to cattle, horses and sheep. And Arabic contains countless words and phrases about the camel. The author Han Shaogong wrote that during a visit to a rural fair in Hainan Province, he asked a fish seller what kind of fish he was selling. The answer came in just one word, fish. Han was unimpressed by the seller’s scanty vocabulary, only to find out that the man could actually reel off at least a hundred fish names in his own dialect but could not recount them in Mandarin. On the surface, those fish names are nothing but a bunch of face values, but their cultural connotations can run so deep as to baffle us outsiders.

No nation in this world boasts as many dialects as China, for the simple reason that the immense social and historical metamorphosis on its vast territory is bound to yield a cornucopia of dialects. The Chinese ideographs, along with a unified written language mandate that was part of a rare brand of imperial politics in world history, circumscribed the changes in Chinese, which is characterized by the presence of numerous dialects under the framework of the same written language. The culture and dialect of that region interact, complement, and cannot do without each other for survival and development. This is the case with Sichuan, Suzhou, or any other localities. If a dialect vanishes someday, a substantial part of what is contained in the local culture will be gone with it.