On the afternoon of 1 April, Business School held the 22nd Hu Tang Ji Hua activity at the 1906 Café of Business School building. The theme this time is Rambling Shanghai Dialect. The third generation direct descendant of Shanghai Burlesque and rap performing artist Yu Beibei led the students to understand the charm of Shanghai dialect culture with his unique comic rap performance.
First of all, the teacher introduced the dialects all over the country, including northern dialect, Fujian dialect, Cantonese dialect, Wu dialect and so on. Among them, Wu dialect is mainly in the Yangtze River Delta region, Jiangnan and Zhejiang region, and is divided into Oujiang, Taizhou, Huizhou, Taihu and so on. And Shanghai dialect is included in Taihu with speakers nearly 100 million, taking up about 8% of total population.
Then the teacher told about the origin of the development of Shanghai dialect. During the Warring States Period, Shanghai was the granted land of Lord of Chunshen Huang Xie of Chu State. Therefore Shanghai was called Shen in ancient times, which was kept and used till today. Now the Huangpu River in Shanghai is also called Chunshenjiang River, while the Shanghai dialect is called Shenque. Shanghai dialect used to be close to Songjiang dialect, which is generally came from Jiaxing area. With the rapid development of Shanghai's urban economic culture and social outlook since the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, Shanghai dialect has entered the period of greatest change where a large number of new words came into being with the emergence of new things. It absorbed a lot of foreign words, create pidgin words and slowly evolved into today's Shanghai dialect.
Teacher Yu explaining Shanghai culture
Then, the teacher talked about the history of Shanghai rap to show unique Shanghai culture. A Jinling Tower rap revealed the teacher's excellence in rap art, the repeated exercise by word and sentence. The students directly felt the subtlety of Shanghai rap. And simple and lively melody made learning and communication more profound and interesting. After introducing the representative characters and stories of Shanghai rap, teacher Yu introduced and sang Warm Man and Grinning in detail to students to help them learn Shanghai dialect.
In the interaction session, the teacher kindly answered the questions raised by the students, and actively introduced his study experience. Finally, the lecture salon was successfully concluded with warm applause.
Teacher and students’ interaction
In this lecture, the teacher told the students the history of the development of Shanghai dialect in his own humorous language. It is believed that after listening to the deep singing of the teacher, the students will be more interested in learning Shanghai dialect.
Academic Investigation Department
Business School Youth League and Student Union
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology
April 1, 2021