Kids from a kindergarten in East China's Anhui Province promote speaking Putonghua on September 19. Photos: CFP

A kid is blowing bubbles.

How much of your native dialect can you still remember? This is probably one of the most embarrassing questions that is asked of young people who traveled away from home to work in the big cities around the country and have to speak Putonghua (Standard Chinese) every day.

Recently, various kinds of examinations testing one's familiarity with his or her dialect - or fangyan as it's called in Putonghua - have become popular on Weibo and WeChat. Using multiple choice, question and answer, true-or-false and other forms of questions, these tests cover a number of dialects that exist in different places across China.

Actually, such examinations have long been available online, to the extent that you can find a test for any city or province easily. Created half jokingly, these examinations attract nostalgic attention toward the dialects of different regions. Deeply attached to their hometown culture, most netizens can't help but excitedly give these tests a go after they set their sights on them.

Grades, however, tend to not be that ideal. Many young people confess online that they are unable to attain high marks on tests for their native dialect, often sighing that they have started to forget the hometown dialect they spoke at home during childhood.

This is not surprising. As Putonghua is a basic requirement for working people, particularly in large cities, they seldom have a chance to speak their dialect so far away from home. And even if they get the chance to occasionally return home and practice speaking, their accents are no longer that of a native speaker.

Personally speaking, born and raised in Henan Province, I could understand and speak my dialect quite well up until I left home for college. After living in Beijing for several years, however, I speak Putonghua even when I'm with old friends from the same place. We've kind of forgotten we have another choice - the tongue of our hometown. 

It's a matter of environment. So we can't really fault young people for being rusty with their mother tongues, nor place any blame on children who learned Putonghua starting from kindergarten. However, the situation is worrying, as dialects from different areas are gradually becoming a tool of communication only used by our parents and grandparents.  

Given these circumstances, people are attempting to protect dialects in various ways. Besides examinations for dialects, there are other more innovative ways. For example, Xu Kai, a post-1980 generation man from Hunan Province, writes songs in his native dialect, something which has earned him quite a bit of popularity online recently. Du Yichao, a young man in his early 20s from Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, also created a popular music video featuring the region's Wu dialect. 

Such efforts are meaningful and help raise public awareness concerning dialect conservation, but in the end are probably only helping postpone their disappearance. I hate to dampen the spirit towards similar ideas and efforts, but as far as I'm concerned, the vanishing of dialects is inevitable, as children, and future generations of children in China, are not being encouraged to learn dialects.

I learned this from personal experience. For instance, just the other day while playing with my 10-month-old daughter in the community park, I heard an elderly Beijing woman (a retired teacher) criticize another elderly lady (from Liaoning Province) for speaking in her native dialect with her 1-year-old grandson.

"You shouldn't speak in your dialect. It's not good for him. Your grandson can be easily influenced, and if so, he'll have a hard time correcting to standard Putonghua when he gets to school," she remarked. The boy's grandmother thanked the woman for reminding her.

The next day, I found my mother thought the same way. A woman who lived in Henan for dozens of years and normally only speaks the Henan dialect day to day, she insists on talking with her granddaughter in Putonghua, even though her accent is a bit off. When I asked why, she said it was good for the baby.

I can't laugh at them for their caution. I still remember when I was a kid in primary school, the entire class would always laugh at anyone who didn't read in Putonghua well. Considering pressures like this, how can you expect parents to teach their children to carry on the dialect of an older generation? 

Children born after 2000 are often asked to learn other languages in order to enhance their competitiveness, but local dialects are probably not on this list. In fact at school they may not even have the chance to get exposed to different dialects.

During a time when Putonghua, which makes communication between different regions more convenient, is deemed as more civilized and advanced, local dialects, which are not any less civilized or advanced, are being repressed as a result.

As the language of a particular place, a dialect is deeply associated with the history and culture of a region. While it is truly a pity to let a dialect go, it's not realistic to try and restore their usage to the level that existed before the establishment of Putonghua as the standard language of China.

Just like today's dialects are the results of development and selection throughout history, their fate, I'm afraid, will have to depend on the development and selection within today's society.

With luck the diversity of China's multitude of dialects and their cultural value can be preserved, though maybe only as living fossils for research.