Shanghainese Language Guide

Also spoken in
China
Script
Han

Where it's spoken

Shanghai Chinese is described as a Wu dialect spoken in the city of Shanghai. A study of Shanghainese text-to-speech describes Shanghainese as a variety of Wu Chinese spoken primarily in urban Shanghai and globally by the Shanghainese diaspora.

The same study says that, despite its formerly prominent status as a lingua franca in the Yangtze River Delta region, Shanghainese is now a minority language in Shanghai, with Putonghua (Standard Mandarin) being the dominant language in the city.

Under China's Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language, the standard spoken and written Chinese language means Putonghua (a common speech with pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect) and the standardized Chinese characters, and the State popularises them.

Sources

Script & pronunciation

This app's cards write Shanghainese in Chinese characters and give a romanization with a tone digit after each syllable, as in 儂好 (non6 hau5, "Hello"). Each syllable in the cards' romanization carries one tone digit, and the cards do not mark tone changes between syllables.

Shanghai Chinese is described as having five citation tones. A study of Shanghainese text-to-speech states that tone sandhi applies to all multi-syllabic words, and a study of tone sandhi in Shanghai Chinese states that when several syllables combine to form a word, tonal change or tone sandhi occurs.

The same text-to-speech study reports that in the transcription corpus it used, a character was sometimes used for its Mandarin pronunciation to approximate the Shanghainese word, for example a surname character for 啥 ("what"), that it calls this practice common, and that the character used to approximate varies from person to person. This app's cards write "What?" as 啥？ (sa5).

Sources

Grammar essentials

The survey of interrogative strategies in the languages of China states that in contemporary Wu the question prefix a- is no longer kept, and that the final interrogative particle va is normally used instead. This app's cards form yes/no questions with a sentence-final 伐, as in 儂會得講英文伐？ (non6 we6 teq7 kaon5 in1 ven6 va6, "Do you speak English?") and 儂好伐？ (non6 hau5 va6, "How are you?"). The card's note says that the particle reads va6, unlike the character 伐 (vaq8, "to fell").

The same survey reports that Shanghai Wu also has questions of the X-neg-X type, which take the form V-neg-VP and sometimes VP-neg-VP, but never VP-neg-V, and that Shanghai Wu wh-questions can take a sentence-final particle.

This app's cards use 勿 (veq8) as "not", placed before the word it negates, as in 我勿懂 (ngu6 veq8 ton5, "I don't understand") and 勿好 (veq8 hau5, "Bad"). The note on the first card says the negator is 勿, not the Mandarin 不.

The survey states that the basic clause order of Chinese is SVO, and that in Modern Chinese and in some Sinitic languages, for example Shanghai Wu, SOV is a recessive alternative order used only in marginal cases such as rhetorical questions and contrastive questions.

Sources

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