The root: dialects, traditions and customs

Anhui is a mosaic of dialects. The range is wide: Zhongyuan Mandarin, Jianghuai Mandarin, Gan, Wu, and Hui across the province, with Min, Hakka, and Shehua surviving in isolated pockets. To outsiders it sounds like a chaotic mess of accents. Linguists might call it a living record of the region’s history. To me it is simply the sound of home.

These dialects don’t exist in isolation. They are scattered across the province in a way that makes them borrow from one another heavily. Take my city, Chizhou. Here you hear Gan, Jianghuai Mandarin, and Wu on the same streets. It is normal to find three generations at one dinner table where the grandfather speaks pure Hui dialect, the father speaks a hybrid of Gan and Mandarin, and the child speaks school-standard Mandarin with a local cadence.

This isn’t unique to Anhui. Look at Guangdong. Cantonese is so distinct it borders on a separate language. Yet within Guangzhou, natives from different districts pronounce words differently and use different vocabulary. The Cantonese-speaking world reaches beyond Guangdong into Guangxi, Hainan, and the Hong Kong and Macao SARs. And even inside Guangdong there are many other dialects. China is a vast nation of 56 peoples. Expecting everyone to sound like a television host delivering ‘standard’ Mandarin is unrealistic. I support Mandarin proficiency. That doesn’t mean abandoning a dialect that exists nowhere else.

Speaking standard Mandarin lets me get around the country and explain where I come from. Understanding my dialect lets me remember who I am when I return. A dialect is a record of where someone comes from. When a child in Chizhou says 吃夜饭 instead of 吃晚饭, or pronounces 家 as gā instead of jiā, they are not making a linguistic error. They are carrying forward a way of speaking passed down through generations. When an old man in Huangshan hums a folk song in the Hui dialect, he keeps alive a sound that exists nowhere else on earth.

The story goes beyond words. The dialects of Anhui are tied to the region’s customs, its food, its soil. Losing the dialect means losing the context for the traditions that live inside it.

Consider the topography. Anhui is stark contrasts: the floodplains of Huaibei, the rolling hills of the Jianghuai, the peaks of the Dabie Mountains. Each zone breeds a different way of life, kept alive through ritual. In northern Anhui, where the plains are wide and wheat is the staple, life follows the harvest. The dialect there is blunt and loud, the way farmers shout across fields. The customs are robust and communal. At the Spring Festival the air fills with smoke from burning mugwort and the roar of firecrackers. The Huaibei Flower-Drum Lamps are explosive, rhythmic performances in a local tongue that resists the softness of the south.

Cross the Yangtze southward and the landscape shifts. In the mountainous south of Anhui, in the ancient villages of Xidi and Hongcun, life moves to a different beat. This is the heartland of Huizhou culture. The dialect here is softer and more melodic, with tones that rise and fall gently. The architecture, the horse-head walls and intricate wood carvings, speaks of a people who valued education, commerce, and filial piety.

In these villages the customs are subtle and tied to the land. The tradition of Worshipping the Kitchen God involves specific incantations recited in the local Hui dialect. Drinking Huizhou tea uses tiny cups and strict etiquette about how to hold the cup and tap the table in thanks. These rituals are the unwritten rules of a society that kept ecological balance and social harmony for centuries. Houses built on Feng Shui principles with local materials were designed to last hundreds of years. Modern urban planning is only now rediscovering that kind of sustainable living.

Then there is the food, the fullest expression of cultural identity. Anhui cuisine ranks among the Eight Great Cuisines of China, yet it is the least understood. It is about fire and time: slow cooking, careful seasoning, and the patience that a mountainous, humid climate demands. Dishes like Li Hongzhang Hotchpotch or Stewed Soft-shelled Turtle with Ham came out of the need to preserve food. Smoking, salting, and braising were techniques passed down through families, taught not from Mandarin cookbooks but in kitchens, through the spoken word, through the dialect.

The tragedy of modern development is forgetting the old while learning the new. In the age of artificial intelligence we train machines to understand hundreds of languages while we let human tongues fall silent. If an algorithm can recognize Cantonese, Wu, or Shehua, surely a society can let its people speak them without shame.

That brings us to artificial intelligence. We live in an era obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and standardization. We train AI models to write essays, diagnose diseases, and drive cars. But look at what we feed these machines. Mostly English, sometimes Mandarin, generally the narratives of the global north and coastal elites. The dataset for a farmer’s dialect in Fuyang is missing. The folk songs of the She people are absent from the training sets. No algorithm understands why a village in Anhui points its houses toward a specific direction.

If we are not careful, AI becomes a tool of homogenization. It will speak perfect Mandarin, but it will never grasp why a Chizhou native hesitates before saying ‘I love you’ directly, preferring to show affection through a bowl of soup.

China’s strength was never uniformity. It is its vastness, its capacity to hold contradictions and local truths inside one civilization. Demanding one kind of ‘correct’ language everywhere would erase most of the country’s internal variety. Protecting dialects does not hold back progress. It makes sure that when we reach the future, we still remember where we came from.

Consider the students from underdeveloped places, the ones waiting for opportunities. Their value isn’t just their potential to become standardized cogs in the national economy. A student who grew up listening to Huaiguo opera in the north has a different sense of rhythm and narrative than a student raised on classical poetry in Hefei. The student who helped harvest tea leaves in the misty mountains of Huangshan understands patience and the relationship between labour and reward in a way no textbook can replicate.

Discussions about ‘education reform’ or ‘bridging the gap’ often focus on giving these students the same textbooks, the same exams, the same chances to become ‘standard’. But what if the goal shouldn’t be standardization? What if the real opportunity is to bring these non-standard experiences into the centre of the conversation?

In natural language processing, one of the biggest challenges is context, sarcasm, cultural nuance. A machine can translate ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ literally and miss the point. It can read a Chinese poem about missing home and fail to grasp the visceral homesickness that hits a migrant worker from Anhui when he hears his village dialect over a crackly phone line. These systems have something to learn from a background rooted in dialect and custom.

So yes, let’s promote Mandarin. Let’s build high-speed rails and 5G networks. Let’s train AI to solve climate change and cure diseases.

But we have to leave room for the sounds that don’t fit the broadcast standard.

Sometimes the most important things are not said in perfect Mandarin. They are whispered in dialects, in kitchens, in villages, in accents that refuse to disappear. They are encoded in the way a grandmother folds a dumpling, in how a farmer reads the weather from the shape of a cloud, in the way a community repairs a bridge after a storm. These habits are what have kept civilizations alive through famine, war, and revolution.

Let the dialects live, and let the customs breathe. The ‘embarrassed provinces’ have something to say.