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Vanishing languages saved for posterity

A recent example of the project that has attracted a lot of media attention was in Dalian, in Liaoning province, where the government this month chose nine residents as representatives of the Dalian dialect. After training, they will record the pronunciation of 1,000 commonly used characters, 1,200 words and some sentences in the Dalian dialect.

"This is the first step in protecting the dialects. We plan to finish recording the dialects across the country in five to 10 years, and we will start with some city and provincial level governments, " Zhang said.

As for developing more uses for the records besides academic materials, Zhang said there is no overall plan yet. "It is hard to give a clear timetable for the whole project because the situation varies from region to region.

"For example, local dialects are still popular in regions like Sichuan, Chongqing and Shaanxi, so there is no rush to preserve the dialects.

"However, in some regions, where the local language is dying out, protection is delayed again and again because of insufficient funds," he said.

China has about 130 different local languages and numerous accents and dialects. There are no official statistics on the number of languages that are disappearing, but Zhang gave some examples.

One example is the She language, which used to be spoken by 50,000 people of the She ethnic group. However, since the people have scattered in Fujian, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Jiangxi provinces, the language has been gradually replaced by other dialects that are more widely used, such as Cantonese.