#i cannot wait until lbotw comes out i'm so excited to read about shadowhunters and downworld in shanghai

[even-love-unreturned]

Ok I’m going to word vomit for a bit cause I haven’t slept in over a day lol and I’ve thought about this a lot, and recently after the LBotW cover+synopsis came out it’s been back on my mind.

So I’d always just accepted without question that yeah Jem grew up in China and speaks Mandarin Chinese, and his dialogue in Mandarin is always spelled out in standard pinyin ok ok not much to question there. But the last time I reread TID it finally came to me that, wait a second, Jem grew up in Shanghai.

In the 1860s.

Someone from a Shanghainese family in the 1860s would not grow up speaking speaking Mandarin, they would be speaking Shanghainese. This means Jem’s mother was originally from another city? In fact, I’d really like to ask Cassie which regional variant of Mandarin does Jem speak, and how is he finding speaking the language in modern day China? I’m intrigued!! What is it going to be like in LBotW, seeing him in his hometown where he grew up not speaking the local language?? Aaaaah

More linguistic and historical pedantry and word vomiting under the cut sdjfkjd:

Obviously, for modern readability, none of TID/TLH era characters are going to speak in exactly the way they used to in their historical time periods. However, the point remains that there’s been far fewer changes in regional speech in England than there’s been in China in the last 150 years. And there’s far less regional difference of language/dialect in England than in China, too.

Modern Mandarin didn’t come into widespread usage in Shanghai until the mid 20th century, when the Beijing variant of Mandarin was voted to become the new standard language, and the government instructed schools to start teaching in Mandarin rather than the local regional dialects.

There were other regional dialects of Mandarin that were in wide usage at canon’s time period, too, particularly the Southwestern variant. (In fact, outside of standard Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin remains the regional dialect with most speakers to this day.)

However, few people in Shanghai in the 1860s would know how to speak Mandarin, any variant of it. To be able to communicate with those from other areas, businessmen and government officials, perhaps, would learn the Beijing guan hua (官话, literally translating to “official-speak”) that would become standard Mandarin. The average person though, would speak only the regional Wu language, more commonly referred to as Shanghainese. Others who spoke Mandarin had to have moved to Shanghai from elsewhere.

The difference between Mandarin and Shanghainese is not like just, say, Yorkshire English compared with American West Coast English. As Jem himself says in CP, Shanghainese is practically unintelligible to someone who speaks Mandarin (which is to be expected, cause it’s literally a different language). And even the difference between Standard Mandarin and Southwestern Mandarin is pretty huge - it would also be hard for speakers to understand each other. (My dad’s side of the family speaks Southwestern Mandarin in the Chongqing dialect, and whoo boy it’s so different I still have a hard time understanding them when they talk)

The Mandarin Jem speaks is essentially just the standard Mandarin nowadays. I’m assuming Cassie just defaulted to the standard Mandarin, because 1) there isn’t really any standardized romanizations of the regional dialects or languages so it’d be harder for the wider audience to understand if she tried to regionalize Jem’s speech and 2) I honestly just don’t think she wanted to put in that much effort lol and her translators seem to just know Mandarin (though perhaps not that well, considering the mistakes and anachronisms and just like, the overall weirdness of Jem’s Mandarin in the books to me, but I digress).

What that means for me - in terms of understanding Jem as a character and headcanons and what-if’s for AUs even:

So we know Jem’s family moved to Shanghai (from London implied) because Jonah was offered the job as head of institute (and btw what’re his qualifications, why this random white Englishman for the Shanghai institute???) Jem learned Mandarin from his mother, which means his mother is likely originally from somewhere that spoke Mandarin. Maybe Beijing? (I remember Jia Penhallow nee Ke is from Beijing, right?)

Because if Wen Yu did speak Shanghainese, why wouldn’t she teach her son, when they had no reason to believe they would ever move away from Shanghai? Was Beijing Mandarin then already the shadowhunter standard in China long before the mundane government standard? If it gets clarified in LBotW that Wen Yu is from Shanghai but somehow she doesn’t speak Shanghainese then Cassie better give me a good explanation lol

But what of Jem’s tutors when he was growing up? Did they know how to speak Shanghainese? Did Jem pick up bits and pieces of the language, did he eventually gain a passing understanding of it despite not being able to speak it?

What would it mean for Jem if he actually full on cannot speak or understand Shanghainese, growing up in a city that spoke pretty much only that language? He wouldn’t be able to roam the city or visit markets or converse with local mundanes. He wouldn’t be able to connect. It would make for an even more isolated childhood, on top of being the only child around.  There’d be a huge disconnect there, even more than him in London with British mundanes. It would also add different meaning to when he thinks about missing his hometown. What does he miss? The buildings, the scenery, the food. But not the people then. And it would mean more shadowhunter aloofness toward mundanes. What would that say about Jem’s upraising and personality development?

Other option: What if Jem is able to understand Shanghainese though can’t speak it? Who would he have learnt it from - a tutor, local Shanghainese shadowhunters, local mundanes?

Jem learned many languages while he was a Silent Brother (I think is what’s implied). What if he took this time to finally learn Shanghainese, to reconnect with his roots?

Jem’s Mandarin is understood to be the Beijing dialect for more meta reasons, but what if he actually speaks the Southwestern dialect?? Wen Yu killed a bunch of Yanluo’s demon kids lol in Lijiang, a city in Southwest China. What would it mean if his mom was actually originally from Southwest China and spoke that dialect, and passed it on to his son? Would Jem have learned and adapted to current standard Mandarin during his years as Silent Brother? There’s a crackfic here somewhere in which Malec and co. get to Shanghai and expect Jem to act as guide and translator BUT NO ONE IN SHANGHAI CAN EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT HE’S SAYING -

Final note on Shanghainese and the current Shanghai:

After Mandarin was established as the standard national language and the Beijing dialect the standard pronunciation in the 1930s or 50s, there was a huge push for getting people to speak (only) standard Mandarin. There was a period of time in 70s/80s when schools would be overzealous, and teachers would even ban the speaking of Shanghainese in classrooms. A lot of people from the last generation would grow up not knowing how to speak their parents’ language, or they would neglect to teach their children the language in favor of teaching only Mandarin. This caused the current generation - including me :( - to be mostly unable to speak the language. Most everywhere in Shanghai will speak standard Mandarin, though cab drivers, streetside food vendors, etc, might still be more comfortable speaking Shanghainese. There’s a push now for reeducation, because they fear the language will start to die out at this rate. My grandparents and my mother are all Shanghainese, and they can all speak the language. I can understand Shanghainese fully, but I can barely speak it. It makes me quite sad tbh.

Final final note lol: all this is just me, word-dumping from memory. This is what I remember of the language history of Shanghai, from what I learned and what I’ve heard from my family. This is not academically researched, nor have I fact-checked every single thing, so please don’t take anything I’ve said as absolute!!

#jem carstairs #tid #gotsm #lbotw #cassandra clare #i cannot wait until lbotw comes out i'm so excited to read about shadowhunters and downworld in shanghai