Beijing dialect is an important symbol of identity." Some argue that Shanghainese also retains a level of local prestige, and others argue that Cantonese is the "only dialect which has attained a level of prestige that rivals that of the standard national language." The dialect has been described as "the official language of the entertainment industry", making it also the "showbiz accent." Even within Beijing the dialect varies. Those north of the Forbidden City spoke with a more "refined" accent than the poorer people, craftsmen, and performers of the south. Younger generation Some fear that the vernacular Beijing dialect will disappear. According to a 2010 study by Beijing Union University, 49% of young Beijingers born after 1980 prefer to speak standard Mandarin rather than the Beijing dialect. According to a UN report, nearly 100 Chinese dialects, especially those spoken by the 55 ethnic minorities in China, are endangered. Mutual intelligibility The Beijing dialect is generally mutually intelligible with other Mandarin dialects, including Putonghua. However it is not intelligible with other Sino-Tibetan languages or even other Chinese languages including Cantonese, Hokkien, and Wu Chinese. The Dungan language is a Mandarin-derived Sinitic language spoken throughout Central Asia, particularly in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Speakers like Dungan poet and scholar Iasyr Shivaza and others have reported that Chinese who speak the Beijing dialect could understand Dungan, but Dungans could not understand Beijing Mandarin. Phonology In fundamental structure, the phonology of the Beijing dialect and Standard Chinese are almost identical. In part, this is because the pronunciation of Standard Chinese was based on Beijing pronunciation. (See Standard Chinese for its phonology charts; the same basic structure applies to the Beijing dialect.) However, the Beijing dialect also has vernacular readings of characters which are not only different, but have initial and final combinations that are not present in Standard Chinese, such as diǎ 嗲, sēi 塞, béng 甭, tēi 忒' and shǎi 色 . However, some striking differences exist. Most prominent is the proliferation of rhotic vowels. All rhotic vowels are the result of the use of the - , a noun suffix, except for a few words pronounced that do not have this suffix. In Standard Chinese, these also occur but much less often than they appear in the Beijing dialect. This phenomenon is known as () or rhotacization, as is considered one of the iconic characteristics of Beijing Mandarin. When /w/ occurs in syllable-initial