Dialect detective: Chinese woman helps find hundreds of missing people nationwide by mastering more than 10 of nation’s diverse native tongues
- 42-year-old volunteer, Tan Yinghuan, has helped as many as 300 people reunite with their lost family members
- China is home to a myriad of dialects, sub-dialects and colloquial expressions of which Tan has taught herself more than 10
A Chinese woman has taught herself more than 10 of the country’s myriad of dialects to help people locate their lost relatives.
Her dedication to dialects in the service of finding missing people has moved many on mainland social media.
For the past nine years, 42-year-old Tan Yinghuan has volunteered to help as many as 300 people reunite with their lost family members.
Among those she has helped are people who were abducted and trafficked when they were young, people looking for blood relatives after growing up with another family and people who got lost and couldn’t find their way home by themselves, such as elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease.
People in such difficulties come from different parts of China and speak a variety of dialects – the Chinese language has 10 primary groups of dialects and each group has a number of sub-dialects and colloquial expressions – so Tan taught herself a range of dialects to broaden her ability to help.
Although she seldom left her hometown of Dezhou in eastern China’s Shandong province, she said she now understands more than 10 dialects spoken in Shaanxi, Hunan, Yunnan, Guangdong, and other provinces nationwide.