Slang dictionary chronicles changing dialect of Beijing

BEIJING - When an old Beijinger says that someone “listens to the song of lalagu”, a Chinese singer, it doesn’t mean the person is a fan of the artiste. In fact, it is a humorous way of saying “to die” in the Beijing dialect.

For most Beijingers, however, this expression now seems unintelligible. Such slang, albeit archaic, has now been compiled into a dictionary, reports Xinhua.

The author, Dong Shuren, a retired professor of linguistics at Beijing Language and Cultural University, has spent over 10 years collecting old Beijing words and phrases.

“Slang words are the fossils of history. I try to record them so that later generations could better understand life in old Beijing,” said Dong.

The New Beijing Dialect Dictionary, which includes 10,200 entries of words and slang, is the first of its kind published in recent years, after Xu Shirong’s Beijing Local Dialect Dictionary in 1990.

But Dong said the tremendous changes in Beijing dialect in recent years have outpaced China’s meagre work to document it.

“I don’t even know what lalagu is,” said 21-year-old Beijing resident Yuan Hui, who preferred buzzwords like “gua” (”to kick the bucket”) when she joked with friends in online chat rooms.

As someone who could not distinguish ploughs from hoes, Yuan could be pardoned for not knowing lalagu, or mole cricket, a notorious crop pest in the eyes of many Chinese peasants.

And given the tunnel-digging habit of lalagus, their ugly chirpings were, in the old language, reserved for those who “bite the dust”.

“China is changing so fast, and so is the Beijing dialect… new slang keeps popping up while old ones are quickly disappearing,” said Dong. “But the efforts to collect those obsolete slang words still lag behind.”

According to Dong, many slang words have pedigrees in customs and cultures that were once widespread in Beijing. Their lifespan, from emergence to extinction, well bespeaks the changes in the city.

“For example, the popularity of cricket fighting in Beijing’s hutongs (narrow alleys) brought about the slang term ‘to return with antennas and tail’ to describe a person who is ’safe and sound’ after a dangerous event,” said Dong.

“Beijing families used to ask ‘quankouren,’ or “complete-family women” to give a hand in wedding preparations, viewing them as auspicious and a blessing to the marriage, and one standard of ‘quankouren’ is to have at least one son and one daughter,” Dong was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

But this slang term, along with the custom, has slipped out of vogue since few women now qualify as “quankouren” following the implementation of the “one child policy”.

“It’s difficult to preserve them in real life since the social phenomena they’re linked to have disappeared,” said Dong. “But a comprehensive recording will benefit future interpretations of literary works of our times.”

The Beijing dialect is the phonological basis of standard Mandarin, and its status as the tone of the Chinese capital also makes it popular in the literature and pop cultures.

Novels of Lao She and comedy films by Feng Xiaogang all feature a vivid use of Beijing-flavoured language.

But due to the influx of immigrants as well as the promotion of Standard Mandarin in China’s education, Dong said, the demographic basis of the Beijing dialect is quickly shrinking.

Usually the more education a Beijing native receives, the less dialect he or she speaks, said Dong.

Linguists and sociologists say dialects across China, and even around the globe, are under similar crises.

“Many local dialects are slowly dying as the fast economic growth results in the unification of communication forms,” said Xiang Daohua, who teaches linguistics at China Foreign Affairs University.

Liu Tieliang, professor of Chinese folklores at Beijing Normal University, also sees this as a natural trend.

“Patois are endemic for a relatively closed region, but as local people interact more with the outside world, local dialects will submit to a common language,” Xinhua said quoting Liu.