During multiple times throughout the history, it wasn't healthy to speak other Iberian languages in public.
- Florentine Italian displaced Sardinian, Napolitan, Romanesco, etc.
- Ille-de-france French displaced Provencal, Occitan, Breton, etc.
- English displaced Scots, Gaelic, Welsh, etc.
Even countrires traditionally considered "nation-states" in a linguistic sense such as Portugal went down this route to some degree, with Mirandese and Barranqueno all but gone nowadays.
Didn't knew that main Italian came from Florence, thanks for the hint.
I know my Iberian friends might have an argument about the last three ones, but I opted to list them as such anyway.
Then there are tiny ones like Leonese, which the government provides support for learning and still have small communities speaking it.
The introduction of the radio and the television played a big part in the shift to Italian and French becoming the normal languages for their respective countries over the multitude of regional languages.
The Chinese government is by no means unique in this approach. Violent suppression of minority cultures has been a common occurrence in world history.
Yes, that’s what I just said.
> Nearly every modern state promotes a national language.
While I agree that many states engage in implicit or explicit suppression of minority cultures (often worse in the past than today), and many (most?) states have a legally declared official language, your brief summary is a false equivalence. There are many places in the world where e.g. media in local languages is allowed, children are allowed to attend schools speaking their native languages, official government documents are translated into all of the most common minority languages, there is institutional support for cultural preservation, minority religious faiths are allowed to freely practice, etc.
So to your points, the only one that Shanghai did not fulfill would probably be the "allowed to attend schools speaking their native languages" part. I'm not sure I think Shanghainese should be, maybe it should have a formal class? There are free classes you can take (usually by District), and everyone spoke Shanghainese at home, so I'm not sure it's necessary.
If you go to Shanghai, buses and subways announce in three languages: Mandarin, English, and Shanghainese. I was just there beginning of October and yes, not all buses had this but it was prevalent enough. This means they are promoting the Shanghainese language (a subset of the larger Wu Chinese dialect). There are TV shows in Shanghai / Jiangsu / Zhejiang that are solely in the Wu dialect - and this is not recent. I remember watching shows with my aunts and uncles 15 years ago. XinMin Evening News always had some cartoons (think New Yorker cartoons but not as highbrow) with Shanghainese dialect subtitles (as in Chinese words that most mimic the Shanghainese dialect).
If you go to Guangdong or Guangxi, many people still have trouble speaking Mandarin, especially outside of bigger cities like Guangzhou. In 2010 I was doing some volunteer work in a tiny village a few hours from Guangzhou and the kids we met literally did not understand Mandarin. The CCP struggled really hard to make schooling in Guangdong province taught in Mandarin (but succeeded by the 80s-ish, again, only in bigger cities). Now though, more and more schools are starting to do Cantonese classes with their own textbooks, alongside the standard Mandarin education.
I am not an expert, but my impression as an outsider is that Shanghai, as one of the richest and most politically influential cities (and main media centers) in today’s China, can accomplish quite a bit more along these lines than most other cities.
It’s great to hear that there is significant support for continued use of Shanghainese. In your experience, has the government’s approach changed over time? Would you say that support for the Shanghainese language is increasing or diminishing? What about popular awareness/activism?
In your experience do most kids in Shanghai today end up using Shanghainese as their primary language when talking with their peers? I have heard from multiple Chinese immigrants that the younger generation in their home cities now primarily use Mandarin.
> Now though, more and more schools are starting to do Cantonese classes with their own textbooks, alongside the standard Mandarin education.
That is encouraging.
Until around 1990, they promoted it brutally, fitting the description of the GP. IIRC the history, in the first free elections in Taiwan in the early 1990s, one appeal of the winner is that he spoke the local dialect.
Edit: it was mentioned in a previous edit of parent comment
[edit] sorry re-read and saw that the U.S. government did fund them.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
> Children taken to such institutions were trained to be assimilated to Anglo-Australian culture. Policies included punishment for speaking their local indigenous languages. The intention was to educate them for a different future and to prevent their being socialised in Aboriginal cultures.