Like Yang, many CU students from other parts of China are running into problems while living in Chongqing, and are quickly learning the value of speaking the local lingo, examples like vendors raising prices as soon as they hear customers speaking putonghua are commonplace.

"Something that sells for 1 yuan ($0.15) to a Chongqinger will be double price for me," said Amar Tunyaz, a 23-year-old Uygur from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and junior at the university.

Back on the CU campus, often times local students will chatter away in their native tongue, leaving many not in the know out of the loop.
"Seeing them talking happily while we can't understand a word makes us feel reluctant to join in," Yang told the Global Times Tuesday.
But what's more difficult is when some of the aged professors on faculty speak Chongqing dialect while lecturing in class.

"I'm going crazy from having to keep up with them. I've almost completely lost interest and motivation in class," Amar said.

In order to solve the communication problem, Yang and some other students got together and established a Chongqing dialect salon at the university early last month, open to all the CU students free of charge.

Till now, more than 30 of CU's students from different regions have attended the new class, gathering wherever they can.

"We run the salon on a shoestring, spending no more than 100 yuan ($14.63) a session," said Yang.

"But the university authority is also showing support by approving their use of classrooms, while even some of the student advisors participate," Yang explained.

Even though they've got the teachers and a place to practice, that doesn't make the language any easier for those new Chongqingers.

"The most difficult thing for us is to pronounce the dialect's tones. They sound so strange coming out of our mouths," she said.

Chongqing native Xiong Yiquan, a 20-year-old junior and volunteer teacher, is also having a hard time with his student's butchering his mother tongue.
"Their pronunciation is pretty off. Sometimes, it's just funny, but I don't know how to solve it," Xiong said.

However, he's happy to have a chance to teach his city's dialect and see some new faces.

"The salon gives us a chance to make friends, relax and open up a dialogue that isn't possible otherwise," Yang said.

Due to frequent wars throughout the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the population of Sichuan, once home to 6 million, dramatically dropped. By the beginning of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), there were no more than 500,000 inhabitants.

In order to revitalize the region, the Qing government ordered over 6 million people from about 10 provinces including Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Jiangxi and Fujian to settle in Sichuan between 1671 to 1776.