Money speaks Mandarin Why dialects are declining
Two years ago, Qi Jiayao visited his mother’s hometown of Shaoxing in eastern China. When he tried to speak to his cousin’s children in the local dialect, Qi was surprised. “None of them was able to,” recalls the linguist, who teaches Mandarin in Oaxaca, Mexico.
The decline in local dialects among. But the popularisation of a standard national language is often at the expense of regional ones, including Han majority dialects and ethnic languages such as Mongolian and Uyghur.
