BEIJING - A school in Beijing has taken the unusual step of encouraging its pupils to speak in dialect in special classes instead of the official language of education and the government, Mandarin, a state newspaper said on Tuesday.

All Chinese schools have to teach in Mandarin, which is also used in virtually all television and radio broadcasts, as part of government efforts to get everyone speaking the same language in a country with many mutually unintelligible dialects.

The government, keen to promote racial unity, has in the past taken a hard line on the public use of dialects. In 2004 they banned the broadcast of "Tom and Jerry" cartoons dubbed into Shanghainese.

But now a school in the capital -- on whose speech standard Mandarin in based -- has started an "I love my mother tongue" class, with almost half its pupils from outside Beijing, the Beijing Youth Daily said.

The children are encouraged to tell stories about their home provinces in their own dialects, and even put on mock news broadcasts to instil pride in their origins and teach other pupils about language diversity in China, the newspaper said.

"Because dialects sound different, pupils used to feel a sense of inferiority about them," it quoted the head teacher as saying.

"Dialects are also a part of the motherland's culture, and if we encourage them to speak in dialect we can show the children it can actually be quite beautiful," the teacher added.