21 Facts About Shanghainese

Shanghainese language, known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas.

Since the 1850s, owing to the growth of Shanghai's economy, Shanghainese has become one of the fastest-developing languages of the Wu Chinese subgroup, undergoing rapid changes and quickly replacing Suzhounese as the prestige dialect of the Yangtze River Delta region.

However, Shanghainese remained a vital part of the city's culture and retained its prestige status within the local population.

From 1992 onward, Shanghainese use was discouraged in schools, and many children native to Shanghai can no longer speak Shanghainese.

Fourteen native Shanghainese speakers had audio recordings made of their Shanghainese on May 31,2011.

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Shanghainese is sometimes viewed as a tool to discriminate against immigrants.

Shanghainese is part of the larger Wu Chinese group of Chinese languages.

Newer varieties of Shanghainese have been influenced by standard Chinese as well as Cantonese and other varieties, making the Shanghainese idiolects spoken by young people in the city different from that spoken by the older population.

Also, the practice of inserting Mandarin into Shanghainese conversations is very common, at least for young people.

Shanghainese is somewhat similar to the speech of neighboring cities of Changshu, Jiaxing and Suzhou, categorized into Su-Hu-Jia dialect subgroup of Wu Chinese by linguists.

Shanghainese has a set of tenuis, lenis and fortis plosives and affricates, as well as a set of voiceless and voiced fricatives.

Shanghainese has five phonetically distinguishable tones for single syllables said in isolation.

Shanghainese has only a two-way phonemic tone contrast, falling vs rising, and then only in open syllables with voiceless initials.

Similar to other Northern Wu dialects, Shanghainese is characterized by two forms of tone sandhi: a word tone sandhi and a phrasal tone sandhi.

Phrasal tone sandhi in Shanghainese can be described as right-prominent and is characterized by a right syllable retaining its underlying tone and a left syllable receiving a mid-level tone based on the underlying tone's register.

Note: Chinese characters for Shanghainese are not standardized and are provided for reference only.

Many recent borrowings in Shanghainese originating from European languages are di- or polysyllabic.

Older speakers of Shanghainese tend to place adverbs after the verb, but younger people, again under heavy influence from Mandarin, favor pre-verbal placement of adverbs.

Shanghainese verbs are analytic and as such do not undergo any sort of conjugation to express tense or person.

Older varieties of Shanghainese featured a different 1st person singular, or, and newer varieties feature a variant of the 2nd person plural as.

Romanization of Shanghainese was first developed by Protestant English and American Christian missionaries in the 19th century, including Joseph Edkins.