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A retired Shanghai University professor is doing something no one else has ever done: encoding the Shanghai dialect in written form.

The project, by 62-year-old Qian Nairong, would also mark the first full written dictionary for a dialect on China's mainland, language authorities said.

"Language that can't be noted in digital form faces the threat of distinction," Qian said in explaining why he applied for a grant from the city's social sciences research fund to make the project possible.

Qian so far has compiled 15,000 words and phrases in Shanghai dialect and expects to finish his dictionary by the end of 2008.

The former professor's plan will eventually lead to computer software that can be used to record the local argot.

In fact, the cyber world is at least partially responsible for a resurgence of interest in Shanghaihua.

Many local youngsters consider it fashionable to use the dialect in their Internet messages, a developer that could be tied to the rise of Chinese rap music based on the local tongue.

Computer programs exist that allow Chinese characters to be typed using pinyin, a system for transliterating ideograms into the Roman alphabet.

But Shanghai dialect has sounds that don't have pinyin counterparts.

"In the past, locals were perplexed by how to put the dialect into a written language, as the pinyin system used for Mandarin was insufficient to cover all the syllables in Shanghai dialect," Qian said.

In the early 1940s, some writers tried to produce novels and essays in the Shanghai dialect. But the effort stalled after the country began to promote Mandarin as a formal language in the 1950s.

Today, kindergarten students are already speaking Mandarin, but many parents are concerned that their kids falling behind in the local idiom.

Qian's first task was to develop a phonetic system to fill the gap between pinyin and Shanghai dialect.

His solution, approved last week by a Shanghai linguistics panel, relies on a combination of pinyin and the international phonetic alphabet, which is well known to the city's English-language students.

In the future, special input software will allow users to use the phonetic scheme to produce Chinese characters from words spoken in Shanghai dialect.

"What I'm doing is marking Shanghai dialect with a unified phonetic system and working out a set of character standard for its writing," he said. "That's the basis for input."

(Shanghai Daily December 5, 2006)