Saving Chinese Dialects, One Wikipedia Entry at a Time
Amateurs edit Wikipedia in dialects to preserve the endangered speech of various Chinese regions
维基百科上，一群业余编辑正在维系、经营着方言社区
Wikipedia is a rabbit hole full of magic portals, and some might take you straight to specific regions of China.
For example, next time you look up “Mid-Autumn Festival,” “Crimean Tatars,” or “Alpha Wave” on the free online encyclopedia, look for a small line of text reading “吴语 (Wu languages)” in the bottom left corner of your browser among the list of other languages the entry is available in. Click on it and you will be transported to Jiangnan (江南, south of the Yangtze), a region that includes southern Jiangsu province, Shanghai, and much of Zhejiang province, where many varieties of Wu, a Chinese dialect or fangyan, are spoken with soft and flowing tones.
At a cursory glance, the Wu Wikipedia might look like the regular Mandarin Chinese version, as most characters are shared between the two varieties of Chinese. Sharp-eyed readers, though, quickly pick up the differences. “No” is no longer 不 (bù) but 弗 ([vəʔ] or [fəʔ], depending on the speaker and region), while 个 ([geʔ], [keʔ], or [ɦeʔ]) takes the place of 的 (de) as the structural particle that connects modifiers and nouns.
The sentences and grammar also tend to take on a less formal air than standard Mandarin. The content is sometimes edited to show a regional flair. On the Wu entry for “hot pot,” editors have highlighted the local relevance of this famous cuisine: “Wu-speaking people particularly like this type [of food] (吴越人交关欢喜搿种).” The word 交关 ([tɕjɔ.kwɛ]) is Wu for “very”; 欢喜 ([hwø.ɕi]), inverted from the Mandarin 喜欢, means “to like”; and 搿种 ([geʔ.tsoŋ]) indicates “this type.”
The Wu language Wikipedia page
People from Wu-speaking regions might chuckle in self-recognition when they stumble upon these pages. In 1986, the State Language Commission set a national agenda to popularize Mandarin, and local dialects in many places gradually fell out of favor, especially in the public sphere. In 1992, for instance, Shanghai’s government banned TV programs in Shanghai dialect (Shanghaihua) and told students not to use fangyan in school.
But now, dialect revival efforts are increasingly visible: at the Shanghai Language Institute’s annual convention in 2011, 82 linguists issued a joint proposal for schools to encourage students to speak the Shanghai dialect at school and have dialect announcements on TV, radio, and public buses.
However, for those who grew up in the 90s and early aughts, dialects could still feel informal, private, and sidelined. Seeing the dialect on Wikipedia pages, transmitting information to a global community, can feel empowering or even subversive for Wu speakers.
The home page of the Wu Wikipedia has the face of a relatively active project: There are 42,678 entries at the time of writing. The page consists of a section highlighting new entries, a section introducing the Wu language, a list of trivia questions whose answers can be found in Wu Wikipedia entries, and a news section, last updated in August 2021 with the latest headline on the Taliban’s occupation of Kabul. On a page called “community hall (社区门堂),” individual editors discuss—and sometimes argue over—the nitty-gritty of linguistics, protocols for deleting posts, and setting up community rules and administrator applications.
“You might think we are an organized body, but we are rather unstructured,” Ignatius Yoe, an editor on the Wu Wikipedia, tells TWOC over the phone. “Some people founded the page, some other people started writing, and others followed.”
Yoe, a 29-year-old Shanghainese engineer, got involved in 2016, when he saw that there were only a little more than 3,000 entries on the Wu Wikipedia and a lot of blanks to fill. “I usually edit entries when I’m in the mood...I’ve edited at least 100 entries, mostly translating from Mandarin pages.” Yoe has penned the entry on Shanghai’s Xujiahui business district (Zikawei in Shanghaihua), among others.
Editors of other Chinese dialect Wikipedia communities are similarly humble about their participation. The Cantonese Wikipedia, a larger resource with 120,888 entries at the time of writing, has a page called “Embassy,” where volunteer editors listed as “Ambassadors” offer welcome messages in languages ranging from English to Vietnamese to Classical Chinese.
Among the Cantonese contributors is Karl Ho, a 24-year-old Guangzhou native who chats with TWOC via Weibo. Ho first started editing 10 years ago, “but I’m not very active,” he says. “I only fix bugs and errors when I come across them.” Born and raised in Guangzhou, Ho is surrounded by lively Cantonese in everyday life, but notes that it is rarely used outside of informal spoken contexts. “Wikipedia is the first place I saw it in a written format. It was quite exciting.”
Fujian province, sandwiched between the Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province and Wu-speaking Zhejiang, is home to many dialects. One of them is Eastern Min, represented by the city of Fuzhou and its vicinity. Ye Jianfei, a software engineer from Fuzhou, didn’t think too much when he joined the Eastern Min Wikipedia project. “I just wanted to help preserve some Fuzhou culture. After all, people who know how to speak the dialect are now few in number,” Ye writes on Zhihu, an online question-and-answer platform.
Other than helping with the technical aspect of the project, Ye also had fun setting up pages unique to Fuzhou, such as one on 𥻵 (sì), a dessert made of glutinous rice—on which he even recorded his own reading of rhyme in Eastern Min about the snack, in addition to translating the entry into Mandarin and English. In total, there are eight versions of Wikipedia in Chinese: Mandarin, Cantonese, Eastern Min, Wu, Gan, Hakka, Southern Min (Hokkien), and Classical Chinese.
The Eastern Min dialect Wikipedia entry on Sì written by Ye Jianfei
There are also people who are more invested in keeping the community alive. Yoe has heard of someone in the Wu Wikipedia community who has kept up with writing a few sentences everyday. The Cantonese group, on the other hand, sometimes hosts member gatherings. “But I’ve never been to any,” says Ho, “I’m a bit shy.”
Keeping up Wikipedia in a dialect is no easy job. “It’s a dry task sometimes. An entry usually takes me an hour to translate. Some editors start when they are college students, but drop out gradually when they graduate and become busy,” says Yoe. Wu Wikipedia as a whole, in Yoe’s opinion, is still quite rough: There are many obvious mistakes, as there is no unified standard on which characters to use for certain words in Wu, while some pages simply copy the Mandarin entries without translation. There are also simply too few entries for Wu Wikipedia to be a complete, useful network of knowledge.
Existing entries vary in quality—while “Alpha Wave” is relatively fleshed out, “Tuk Tuk” consists of one photo, and one short line that ends in a comma in Wu. Dialect pages are also inconsistent in their referencing. Take “Taliban” as an example: While the English page lists 571 citations, and the Mandarin Chinese page 112, there are only 32 references in Cantonese. The same entry has just three lines of text and no citations in Wu, and one line of text in Eastern Min.
A lack of standardization is a problem across all dialect versions of Wikipedia. The famously tough variety of Wu spoken in Wenzhou can be unintelligible to speakers in Suzhou, and there are countless shades of differences in between. According to Yoe, most Wu Wikipedia entries adopt the Shanghai variety as standard, although sometimes editors also write in the Jiangyin, Wuxi, Suzhou, Taizhou styles. Sometimes a page can be a mixed bag of variations.
“Wu Wikipedia is like a mascot [for Wu speakers online]. Most people keep it up just for fun. It is one additional way to represent the Wu language,” says Yoe. He feels that true, substantive efforts to keep dialects alive lie beyond Wikipedia. He names a few groups making more concerted efforts to preserve the language, such as the Wu Language School (吴语学堂), a volunteer group operating a WeChat account that regularly shares educational articles and an online dictionary that includes various branches of Wu.
Yoe himself teaches the Shanghai dialect online as a passion project. According to his impressions, Shanghai locals born in the 1980s still use the dialect frequently in their daily communication, although with many pronunciation mistakes, while those born between 1990 and 1995 are less willing to speak it among their peers. He finds that the Gen Z is typically able to understand the dialect when spoken to, but cannot speak it themselves. In 2012, a survey of students in seven elementary and middle schools by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences found that only about 60 percent of local students can fully understand and speak basic Shanghai dialect.
“Shanghaihua is still very alive, but it would be a shame to see it go into decline. The dialect is a distinguishing characteristic of Shanghai,” says Yoe. The students he now teaches are mostly people who have moved to Shanghai from elsewhere and are seeking to integrate more into this city. Yoe’s work means they at least have one more resource to help them in that endeavor.
Cover image by VCG
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