Wedding together to sing "weeping wedding song" Mid-Autumn Festival about to sing "South Song"

Dialect business card

Slogan

Scope: In the southwest of Huaiji County, Zhaoqing City, Guangdong Province, Yonggu, Shidong, Qiaotou, Dagang, Zhagang, Liangcun and other places, as well as some villages adjacent to Fengkai County, Jingui, Qixing and Chang'an, there are still about 70,000 or 80,000 people who still use the slogan.

Features: It belongs to the Dongshui branch of the Zhuang Dong language family, an independent minority language, which is also known as "leopard language" in written documents.

From the county seat of Huaiji County in Guangdong Province, the mountains stand along the way, and the roads are winding and winding. Suddenly, the scenery of the road ahead suddenly opened up, and it went straight to the jurisdiction of Shidong Town.

The people who live here speak languages that are very different from the surrounding Cantonese and Hakka dialects. This special "slogan" was identified as "an independent minority language belonging to the Dongshui branch of the Zhuang Dong language", and the Shidong "standard speakers" have also become one of the few Han people who use ethnic minority languages.

In the past, men and women worked in the forest to sing "mountain songs", and sisters sang "weeping and marrying songs" together for days, but now the way of life has changed, the songs and cries are becoming more and more rare, and the slogans are facing the dilemma of becoming increasingly "endangered", only the nostalgia and family affection condensed in them are still continuing.

"It seems like someone from another world"

"More than 700 years belonged to Guangxi, and more than 800 years belonged to Guangdong", this sentence recorded in the Huaiji County Chronicle hints at the local migration and flow. The Shidong people, who live in the southwest of the county seat, grew up in the Han area of Guangdong, but did not communicate with the surrounding languages and customs, and once had anxieties about their ethnic identity.

At the home of Xu Wenhai, the former director of the Shidong Town Cultural Station, there is also a copy of the 1983 manuscript, "Report on the Request for re-examination of the Shidong Ethnic Nationality". In that year, local people from all walks of life formed an "ethnic issue investigation group" to sort out the historical and geographical evolution of Shidong, marriage and funeral customs, and went to many places to investigate the living and cultural habits of the surrounding areas.

"It really seems to be someone from another world", the two contrasted, the inspection team sighed. They recorded the language and folk songs of the Shidong people of that year, and together with the report submitted a request to send experts to identify the nationality.

"Shidong dialect" is called "standard dialect" and "leopard dialect" in written literature. Xu Wenhai told Nandu reporters that in 1986, the people's government of Huaiji County submitted to the people's government of Guangdong Province a "Report on Requesting the Identification of ethnic compositions in the "Leopard Talk" area of our county." In the same year, Liang Min and Zhang Junru, researchers at the Institute of Ethnic Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at the time, went to Huaiji to investigate the "leopard dialect", which they believed was "an independent minority language belonging to the Dongshui branch of the Zhuang Dong language tribe", and was collectively called "biao dialect" because of the indecent name of the "leopard dialect". The following year, the Shidong people who used "slogans" were identified as Han Chinese.

Today, The permanent population of Shidong Town is more than 50,000 people, and slogans are still used in daily life. They called their father "Weng Tuo", their brother "Ah Zhang", "Jigou" for eating, and "Huaxia Che" for buffalo, these special pronunciations and vocabulary are far from the Han language, outsiders can hardly penetrate the language secrets of "speaking standard people", and the locals usually speak Hakka and Cantonese to facilitate foreign exchanges.

"Bidders" love to sing folk songs and lyrics

In the poetry cave, the "speakers" love to sing folk songs and lyrics - singing southern songs by the water, singing mountain songs in the forest, singing tea songs in He Xinju, singing weeping wedding songs at weddings, singing white affairs songs at funerals, generations from birth to death, celebrating and mourning, singing and weeping with joy.

In the eyes of the locals, the "weeping wedding song" is the most representative, and it is also called "yinshu" in the slogan. Xu Wenhai remembers that when he was a child, his mother worked in a state-owned forestry factory, and it rained heavily one day, and the female workers could not go up the mountain, and a group of more than 20 people sat on the bunks in the dormitory and sang the weeping wedding song. ”

The daughters were reluctant to leave "Auntie", thinking of exchanging birthdays, accepting gifts from the matchmaker, and the relatives agreed to leave home from now on, and their hearts were full of regret.

In Xu Wenhai's generation, in 1986, when he got married, he followed the old customs, his wife wore black clothes and black pants and black shoes, held a black umbrella head tied with red rope, covered his face with a red feather fan, and accompanied the sending team all the way to his home, behind which was a dowry picked up by a flat bamboo basket.

Since the 1990s, Western-style weddings have been introduced to the local area, black clothes and pants have been replaced by snow-white wedding dresses, weeping wedding songs are no longer a necessary ceremony, and the lively songs of the past have become increasingly rare.

In the past, during the Mid-Autumn Festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, the "bidders" went down to the post to sing the southern song on the bank of the river. As a relief from boredom in the mountains and forests, men and women sing mountain songs and express their admiration for each other. Nowadays, young people have gone out to work, and the "Nange" and "Mountain Song" are no longer grand, but only remain in the images.

If not protected, it is likely to be assimilated into Cantonese

The "storytellers" of Shidong have not yet realized that their familiar rural sounds are close to "endangered".

Yang Bixuan, an associate professor at the School of Culture and Media at Hezhou University in Guangxi, is a native of Huaiji County. Around 2012, Yang Bixuan participated in the Ministry of Education's philosophy and social science research major research project "Chinese Dialect Culture Collection", and was responsible for the "Guangdong Huaiji Dialect Culture Collection".

In the following years, she led Xu Wenhai, Lin Yuda and others in Shidong Town to conduct field visits and investigations from the aspects of local famous objects, folk customs, mouth color taboos, colloquial proverbs, folk literature and art, etc., to mark the pronunciation of slogans, label the international phonetic alphabet for the slogans without words, and collect more than 600 cultural pictures of the dialects, leaving behind extremely valuable audio and video materials.

The only regret is that the traditional wedding ceremony in Shidong cannot be restored. Xu Wenhai said that the team once wanted to fund the project funds to invite local couples to hold weddings according to old customs, but no one wanted to, "it is too earthy." ”

In the investigation, Yang Bixun found that the slogan vocabulary is gradually lost, influenced or even replaced by Cantonese, "standard speakers" intermarry with foreigners, school-age children learn foreign languages, and the accent of the slogan is no longer pure. If left unprotected, the slogan may be assimilated into Cantonese. This increasingly "endangered" minority language still condenses a strong nostalgia and is an important emotional maintenance between the same countryside.

In 2012, he and his fellow villagers founded the "Shidong Cultural Communication Center" website, which covered popular songs with slogans and uploaded the website for fans to download and use. Lin Yuda said that he hopes to put the authentic slogan vocabulary into the song and continue the language in the sound of singing.

During the epidemic last year, Xu Wenhai was invited to the town to record the dialect version of the epidemic prevention broadcast, "Don't go to the street!" Don't go to the street! Don't go to the street!" The kind rural voice crossed the town street through the loudspeaker, and after the closure of the village was lifted, the neighbors touched him and said excitedly, "Brother Hai, your voice has spread all over the land of Shidong."

Yang Bixun once hoped to establish a museum of label language and culture in her hometown, set up a language audio-visual recording room, and a folk customs physical exhibition hall to protect and inherit the label. It still didn't work out, and she still felt the need for it. Only by racing against time can we keep the country tone.