A survey of attitudes toward Chinese dialects conducted by the China Youth Daily newspaper found that about 70 percent of respondents say young people should speak their local dialect, but only around 63 percent said they are able to speak a regional dialect.
More than 10 percent of the 2,002 people surveyed said that they have difficulty in speaking a local dialect and more than a fifth of the people surveyed, most of whom are millennials, said that speaking a regional dialect can lead to discrimination.
According to the book Chinese Language published by The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2007, there are at least 129 dialects in China, many of them mutually unintelligible. Putonghua, a standardized language often known in the West as Mandarin, is the country's official language and the one taught in schools across the country.
"Putonghua is regarded as the common tongue of the Han people, and while the common tongue has many versions in different areas, they all significantly and fundamentally convey Chinese culture," Xu Baohua, a linguist at Fudan University and author of the Chinese Dialects Dictionary, was quoted as saying by thepaper.cn in November 2016.
Xu has strived to preserve local dialects, urging people to speak both their local dialect and Putonghua.
"We should take measures to prevent dialects from disappearing so quickly," Xu added.
Some cities have taken action to protect their dialects.
The city of Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province, has trained over 400 teachers to promote the local dialect in schools, residential communities and companies, according to the Beijing-based Guangming Daily.
"We've lived in many cities, and we speak our dialect at home, because I don't want our son to forget where he comes from," Fang Tingting, a native of East China's Anhui Province told the Global Times Thursday.
