Children from Pingtan Island, Fujian province, rehearse nursery rhymes for the Cross Straits Folk Cultural Festival scheduled on Feb 19. [Photo provided to China Daily]

A nursery rhymes performance held by about 20 children from Pingtan amused audiences at the Cross Straits Folk Cultural Festival held on Feb 19 in Fuzhou, Fujian's provincial capital.

The performance consisted of five popular folk songs from Pingtan. Lin Ailin, a local teacher and a folk culture lover, collected the traditional lyrics and wrote the music. He is also the leader of this performance.

"More and more children in Pingtan speak Mandarin instead of the Pingtan dialect. I have to correct their pronunciation since the lyrics are in the local dialect," Lin said.

"These songs are different from our musical textbooks, but they are very interesting," said You Shanmei, one of the children in the performance.

This is the largest-scale festival in recent years, with most performances organized by grassroots cultural organizations. The nursery rhymes performance was the first event to go on stage.

"Dialect is a 'voice memory' that records history and culture," Lin added. He hopes to keep the traditional Pingtan dialect culture alive by collecting folk lyrics and re-composing them.

Edited by Chen Zhilin and Michael Thai