MCLC: Wenzhou dialect

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Wenzhou dialect
***********************************************************

Source: China Real Time (5/23/14):
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/23/what-its-like-to-live-in-chin
a-and-speak-the-devil-language/

What It’s Like to Live in China and Speak the “Devil-Language”
By Lilian Lin 

When I tell other Chinese people that I am originally from Wenzhou, I
usually get two replies.

One, your family must be rich; two, your dialect is basically a foreign
language.

The first reaction comes from the time-honored reputation that people from
my coastal hometown city have—namely that we are good at doing business,
which has earned us the nickname of the “Jews of China.” The other was
something that I did not wholly realize until I came to Beijing for
college eight years ago.

At the time, living at a school dorm of less than 20 square meters — one
shared with five other girls — the ability to speak Wenzhou dialect when I
called friends or family was really a blessing: it gave me more privacy as
none of my roommates, who were from five cities across in China, could
understand a single word of my conversations. Even after four years
together, they still couldn’t stop frowning at me every time I called my
family. There she goes, they’d say, speaking “the devil-language” again,
as some call the dialect. This week, the difficulty of Wenzhou dialect was
once again affirmed in a list circulating on Chinese social media, which
declared 
<http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/21/do-you-dare-try-the-devil-la
nguage-chinas-10-hardest-dialects/> that Wenzhou’s dialect was the hardest
in the country.

I’ve lost track of the number of times people have told me that they
thought Wenzhou dialect sounds like Korean or Japanese. Once when I was at
a Korean restaurant in London talking with a Wenzhou friend, a Korean guy
came up to us. After staring for awhile, he asked, “Which part of Korea do
you come from? Your language sounds Korean but I don’t really understand
it.”

When I speak dialect in public over phone or with friends, people
frequently give me a second look: the same reaction I get when I speak in
English. Once when sitting down at a hotpot restaurant in Beijing while
talking Wenzhou dialect over phone, the waitress asked me if I needed an
English menu.

During my time studying Korean and Japanese, both in college and as a
hobby, I found that the pronunciation of some Wenzhou words really sounds
similar to both languages. For example, when we say “what” in Wenzhou
dialect, it sounds like how Korean say “no.” And when we say “world” in
Wenzhou dialect, it sounds similar to the same word in Japanese.

Sometimes speaking “the devil-language” has benefits. A Wenzhou friend of
mine told me that a couple of years ago in Beijing, he and a friend were
pulled over after a police officer caught him driving the wrong way on a
one-way road. After the police stopped him, he called his family to tell
them what was going on, a conversation they had in Wenzhou dialect. The
officer, listening, asked the friend beside him: is he Chinese? His
friends joked: “I don’t know, he’s probably Thai.” The officer then let
them go, saying, “I don’t want to deal with foreigners. Too much trouble.”

There are other benefits, too. For example, I find speaking such a
difficult dialect helps me understand the other Chinese dialects more
easily, at least to the point of being able to understand key words and
figure out the general topic of a conversation – something that seems to
be impossible for other Chinese, especially northerners.

Is Wenzhou dialect really the hardest in China? Like other dialects in
China, the pronunciation and tone of Wenzhou dialect are quite different
from Mandarin. The dialect has generally preserved the sentence structure
and slang of ancient Chinese language, especially that spoken locally near
Wenzhou hundreds of years ago. But unlike other dialects, it’s so
different from modern Mandarin that two friends of mine, who moved to the
Netherlands when they were kids, have since come back to China to learn
Mandarin. Even though they speak fluent Wenzhou dialect, it doesn’t help
them that much in speaking modern Chinese.

Even within Wenzhou’s prefecture, home to more than 9 million people,
people speak the same dialect with pronunciations that greatly vary. Most
young people in my generation cannot understand the dialect spoken, for
example, by people from another district. Complicating matters, people
from areas around Wenzhou’s Cangnan county even speak Minnan dialect, also
among the most difficult dialects in China.

To avoid embarrassment of misunderstanding each other, we in Wenzhou
prefer to speak Mandarin if we run into locals from other districts. In
those moments, I realize how “devilish” the language really is.