Here a story about a book worth protecting... The latest project of a seventy-year-old retired professor was to preserve Beijing's local language. Now he's a local icon because he has complied a ...

BEIJING - When you hear an old Beijinger say that someone "listens to the song of lalagu", it doesn't mean the guy is a fan of a famous singer named Lalagu. In fact, it's a humorous and euphemistic ...

Reporting from Beijing — In Guangzhou, the city formerly known as Canton, Chinese government banners hang in primary schools with instructions to use the country’s official language, Mandarin, also ...

Regarding Hugo Restall’s review of “Kingdom of Characters” (Bookshelf, March 2): The Beijing dialect, known in the West as Mandarin, was voted by the Kuomintang to be the guoyu, or national dialect, ...

Thousands of years of Chinese linguistic heritage have come down to this: a squabble over Tom and Jerry. Dubbed into regional Chinese dialects, the warring cat and mouse have been huge TV hits _ and a ...