How a Language Becomes Emblem for Metropolitan Nostalgia: Reimagining Shanghai’s Languages, Remaking Shanghainese Identities

Author: Dani Wu ︱Editor: Vicky Strong

In December 2023, the hit television series Blossoms Shanghai premiered on Chinese national television.^[1] Set in late 20th century Shanghai and based on a novel of the same name, the series was released in a Shanghainese language version in addition to a Standarin¹ dub, standing out from the bulk of current Chinese media in exclusively Standard Mandarin.

The show took the city by storm. Aside from its choice of language, Blossoms is also regarded as an emblematic piece expressing Shanghainese identity. Largely continuing the literary trope of “Shanghai nostalgia” (上海怀旧/上海懷舊 zaon-he we-jieu)² popularized in the 1990s, it fits into a genre of storytelling largely contingent on an imagination of historical Shanghai as a lavish “East-meets-West” metropolis.^[2] Through the remembrance of Shanghai’s former glamour, or through the reconstruction of daily life in its scenic old-style buildings, this trend of “nostalgia” has regiven meaning to Shanghai’s postcolonial remnants of early metropolitanism, that continue to relate to current-day experiences of being Shanghainese.^[3,4]

As cityscapes across China show increasing trends of homogenization, Shanghainese people have reported a sense of loss towards “regional” spaces and identities.^[5] In many ways, language revitalization campaigners have catered to this sense of “nostalgia”, appealing often to the idea of preserving more “traditional” varieties of Shanghainese and turning to material such as “Shanghai history” and “folk songs”.^[6] But sometimes this approach seems to fall short. In the novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, the “sensual” old alleyway houses of Shanghai, once home to ordinary people’s daily lives and dreams, also “die” eventually along with the protagonist among an era of continuous societal changes.^[4] A collective “longing” for the past constructed through memory is arguably a natural reaction to the “discontinuities and dislocations” caused by the constant political shifts in Shanghai, but the now radically rearranged social fabric of Shanghai seems to present just as many dilemmas in the face of Shanghainese’s decline.^[2,7] At some point “nostalgia” is just not enough anymore.

The past couple of decades have marked the occurrence of a dramatic language shift in Shanghai. Currently Standarin has largely replaced Urban Shanghainese³ as the biggest lingua franca in Shanghai, as the main language for official communications in work- and education-related registers.^[8] Before this, Shanghai’s linguistic landscape was largely affected by migrant communities from neighbouring provinces, who, having come to seek opportunities or flee war, also contributed majorly to the population boom that encouraged Shanghai's early concession-era metropolitanism.^[9] Many of them banded themselves together into sociolinguistic enclaves, building solidarity through shared language, shared culture, and often shared socioeconomic status.^[10] Under this large-scale multilingual contact, Urban Shanghainese increasingly distinguished itself from other surrounding Shanghainese Wu varieties, becoming the main lingua franca in Shanghai’s inner-city districts and the most salient linguistic marker for urban-oriented Shanghainese people, many of whom have ancestry from outwith Shanghai a few generations ago.^[10,11]

The pervasive multilingualism in Shanghai was and still is governed by a vast web of language ideologies. While the legal precedence favouring Standarin in the People’s Republic of China can be traced back to the 1950s, it had majorly overtaken Shanghainese after the passing of the Fourth national Constitution in 1982, which saw increased efforts to promote Mandarin in schools and workplaces.^[8,12] The economic reforms following the 1978 Open Door policy have also greatly increased population mobility, attracting newer influxes of migrant workers from rural areas, and later giving rise to communities of well-off, well-educated recent immigrants sometimes labelled “New Shanghainese”.^[10,12,13] People’s increased use and exposure to Standarin has increased its positive associations, as an asset for work and education.^[14] This has led to the attrition of Shanghainese acquisition in children from Shanghainese-speaking families.^[15] Whereas any Mandarin use was historically regarded as a marker of non-localness and subject to discrimination, a large part of this stigma seems to have transferred onto dialectal Mandarin forms which are non-Shanghainese, as Shanghainese and New Shanghainese people alike have started to align themselves with Standarin given the social mobility that it now provides.^{[11,13,16,17]} As notions around Shanghainese metropolitanism also become increasingly globalized, the use of larger, arguably more prestigious lingua francas e.g. Standarin or English in Shanghai, seems to be on the uptick, becoming part of the regular linguistic resource and identity marker for young, educated, middle-class urbanites.^[8,11]

The Shanghainese language has opened up one key pathway for Shanghainese people to reconstruct their relationships to urban spaces against the reported “anxiety” about “vanishing locality”.^[6,18] Revitalization campaigns often bank on such sentiments - the Shanghainese Heritage Project (SHP), for example, is one programme self-proclaiming to tackle the “crisis of Shanghainese” through promoting Shanghainese use in kindergartens.^[19] But the impact of such an approach is twofold. The search for a metropolitan “Shanghainese” identity also hides in its underbelly long-standing sentiments of xenophobia towards “non-locals” from the “countryside”, a pejorative with history at least starting from Shanghai’s early metropolitan era. After the 80s Open Door economic reforms, the household registration (戶口)⁴ system has also been especially hostile to immigrant families and consequently regarded as one blocking benefits to non-locals, and indeed a great topic of controversy weaponized in online discussions regarding SHP.^[12,19] Purist attitudes towards Shanghainese are not scarce either. Sound shifts such as onset /ŋ/-dropping come to be associated with “non-local accent” and “Mandarin influence”, eventually mobilized in rhetoric discouraging youngsters from speaking “broken” Shanghainese.^[16] The linguistic resources that individuals can garner in the multilingual surroundings of Shanghai still does largely correlate with their socioeconomic status and potential for social mobility, and the delicate role that language education might have in reinforcing current socioeconomic hierarchies ought to be examined with care - especially when framed under the simplistic guise of “heritage”.^[11,17,19]

The search for a “Shanghainese” identity and language remains complicated, embedded in all too many fraught relations between old and new, local and migrant, rich and deprived. The delicate linguistic sphere of Shanghai leaves Shanghainese and other regional languages still in precarious positions, even as language maintenance is becoming increasingly visible in the public consciousness. But maybe, through rediscovering the meanings of Shanghai’s linguistic past, a clearer position from where we could interact with its many languages might just emerge in the future.

References

[1] Xu, W. (2023). Pilot of Wong Kar-wai’s TV directorial debut to air on Wednesday. SHINE. https://www.shine.cn/feature/entertainment/2312277084/

[2] Wan, F. (2020). New Shanghai nostalgia: old buildings in Blossoms. International Communication of Chinese Culture, 7(3), 307–317. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-020-00188-9

[3] Zhao, J. (2010). "Shànghǎimèng de Qìhé yǔ Chāyì - lun Chéng Nǎishān yǔ Chén Dānyàn de Shànghǎi Huáijiù Shūxiě [The Agreements and Disagreements between “Shanghai Dreams” - Discussion on the “Shanghai Nostalgia” Narration of Cheng Naishan and Chen Danyan] [Thesis]. https://www.doc88.com/p-2893485653329.html

[4] Scheen, L. (2012). Sensual, but No Clue of Politics: Shanghai’s Longtang Houses. In G. Bracken (Ed.), Aspects of urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou (pp. 117–136). Amsterdam University Press.

[5] Xu, F. (2021c). Chapter 3. Geographical Displacement and Language Loss. In Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China (pp. 99–130). Lexington Books.

[6] Wellman, L. (2013). Pudong and Putonghua: Sound Change and Language Shift in Shanghai (p. 26–7) [Undergraduate Thesis]. https://ling.yale.edu/media/332/download?inline

[7] Zhang, Z. (2024). Blossoms Shanghai as a Carrier of Memory: The “Construction” and “Function” of Collective Memory. Studies in Art and Architecture, 3(3), 24–30. https://doi.org/10.56397/saa.2024.09.06

[8] Xie, Y. (2011). Language and Development of City: The Linguistic Triangle of English, Mandarin, and the Shanghai Dialect. The Trinity Papers, 17–28. Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford, CT. https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/trinitypapers/3/

[9] Qian, N., & Shen, Z. (1991). The Changes in the Shanghai Dialect. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series, 3, 375–425. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23827044

[10] Chu, X.-Q. (2001). Linguistic diversity in Shanghai. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 11(1), 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.11.1.04xia

[11] van den Berg, M. (2016). Modernization and the restructuring of the Shanghai speech community. Restructuring Chinese Speech Communities, 26(1), 112–142. https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.26.1.05van

[12] Xu, F. (2021a). Chapter 2. “China Dream” versus the Shanghai Dialect. In Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China (pp. 61–97). Lexington Books.

[13] Weng, S. (2022). The second generation of “New Shanghainese”: Their language and identity. http://grammar.ucsd.edu/sdlp/current/Shihong_Weng_Second_generation_of_New_Shanghainese_Issue12.pdf

[14] Bai, J. (1994). Language Attitude and the Spread of Standard Chinese in China. Language Problems and Language Planning, 18(2), 128–138. https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.18.2.03bai

[15] Peng, Y., & Wan, Y. (2023). Understanding parental agency in family language policies from language-as-resource ideology perspective: the case of three Shanghainese families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2023.2256334

[16] Liu, G.-Q. (2012). Social identity and sound change: The case of “wo” in Shanghainese. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 35(2), 203–214. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.642622154957812

[17] Yang, H., & Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2020). Conflicting linguistic identities: language choices of parents and their children in rural migrant workers’ families. Current Issues in Language Planning, 22(4), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2020.1748370

[18] Chen, J. (2017). “Dìfāngxìng” Xiāoshī de Jiāolǜ — lùn “Fán Huā” de Huáijiù Xùshì [The Anxiety of Locality Disappearing— Discussion on the Nostalgia Narration of Fan Hua] [Master’s Dissertation].

[19] Shao, Q., & Gao, X. (Andy). (2018). Protecting language or promoting dis-citizenship? A poststructural policy analysis of the Shanghainese Heritage Project. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(3), 352–364. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1451482

1. Here I use the terms “Standard Mandarin” and “Standarin” (portmanteau of “Standard Mandarin”!) interchangeably to refer to the same standardized variety of spoken and written Chinese mandated by PRC government policies. The term “Mandarin” is used on occasions where certain “non-standard” forms of Mandarin are at hand (e.g. in talking about “accented” or varieties of the Mandarin language family that are otherwise seen as “nonstandard”).

2. Chinese characters are given in both simplified and traditional variants separated by slashes, and Shanghainese transliterations (when given) are given in the romanization scheme by www.wugniu.com, the current main romanization used for Shanghainese on Wiktionary. When the simplified and traditional variants use the same glyphs they are not repeated.

3. The terms “Shanghainese” and “Urban Shanghainese” here are both to be differentiated from Northern Wu varieties traditionally associated with Shanghai’s originally rural areas. Customarily in Shanghainese, the term 上海闲话/上海閒話 zaon-he-ghe-gho (lit. “Shanghai Speech”) is used to refer to Urban Shanghainese, instead of rural Wu varieties spoken in Shanghai, sometimes given the collective name 本地闲话/本地閒話 pen-di-ghe-gho (lit. “Local/Indigenous Speech”). Notably, the latter term does carry stylistic connotations associated with linguistic “conservativeness” which can play roles in urban or non-urban identity discourse, though the exact ways this is accomplished is out of the scope of this article.

4. Household Registration or Hukou (戶口 wu-kheu) is a populace registration system used in the PRC, directly linking to benefits such as healthcare, housing status and right to public education. Gaining a Hukou for tier-1 cities such as Shanghai is especially difficult, causing many challenges for migrant worker families and inciting much criticism and debate.^[12,19]