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Shanghainese (上海言话 [zɑ̃˨.'he˦.ɦɛ˨.ɦʊ˩] in Shanghainese), sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is not mutually intelligible with other Chinese dialects such as Standard Mandarin (see Mutually intelligible languages). Shanghainese is the representative dialect of Northern Wu; it contains vocabulary and expressions from the entire Northern Wu area (southern Jiangsu, northern Zhejiang). With nearly 14 million speakers, Shanghainese is also the largest single coherent form of Wu Chinese. In Western sources, the term "Shanghainese" often refers to all Wu dialects and not specifically the particular Wu dialect spoken in Shanghai. The total number of Wu speakers is over 80 million, the second largest Chinese language after Mandarin. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Not to be confused with the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, in number of speakers worldwide second only to Indo-European. ... Wu (吳方言 pinyin wú fāng yán; 吳語 pinyin wú yÇ”; Latin method wu gnu(niu)) is one of the major divisions of the Chinese language. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... Not to be confused with the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Wu (吳方言 pinyin wú fāng yán; 吳語 pinyin wú yÇ”; Latin method wu gnu(niu)) is one of the major divisions of the Chinese language. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Standard Mandarin is the official Chinese spoken language used by the Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Jiangsu (Simplified Chinese: 江苏; Traditional Chinese: 江蘇; Hanyu Pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: Chiang-su; Postal System Pinyin: Kiangsu) is a province of the Peoples Republic of China, located along the east coast of the country. ... Zhejiang (also spelled Chehkiang or Chekiang) is an eastern coastal province of the Peoples Republic of China. ...

Shanghainese is rich in consonants and pure vowels [i y ɪ ɥ e ø ɛ ə ɐ a ɑ ɔ ɤ o ʊ u]. Like other northern Wu dialects, the Shanghai dialect has voiced initials [b d g ɦ z v ʥ ʑ] (although technically these are slack voiced, adding a slightly breathy quality to a following vowel). Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese has voiced initials. The Shanghainese tonal system is significantly different from other Chinese languages. Shanghainese is a language with two live tonal contrasts (high and low), while Mandarin and Cantonese are contour tonal languages. Wu (吳方言 pinyin wú fāng yán; 吳語 pinyin wú yÇ”; Latin method wu gnu(niu)) is one of the major divisions of the Chinese language. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... Alternative meaning: Initial (linguistics) Detail from a rare Blackletter Bible (1497) printed in Strassburg by J.R.Grueninger. ... The term slack voice (or lax voice) describes the pronunciation of consonants with a glottal opening slightly wider than that occurring in normal full voice. ... Breathy voice or murmured voice is a phonation in which the vocal folds are vibrating as in normal voicing, but the glottal closure is incomplete, so that the voicing is somewhat inefficient and air continues to leak between the vocal folds throughout the vibration cycle with audible friction noise. ... This article is on all of the Yue dialects. ... It has been suggested that Tonal language be merged into this article or section. ...

Language policy

Shanghainese is not encouraged to be spoken in schools and written in newspapers, and the media are strongly discouraged from broadcasting in contemporary Shanghainese. There is a lot of uncertainty between what gets aired in Shanghainese and what becomes censored (due to government fears of regionalism), thus most producers do not take this risk and only produce in Mandarin. Several television advertisements in Shanghainese have been removed shortly after airing. But there have been some TV series in Shanghainese that were approved since the mid-1990s. Back in 1995, a TV play series called "Nie Zhai" (the Evil Debt) was in Shanghainese; when it was broadcast in other places in China, mainly in adjacent Wu-speaking provinces, subtitles in Mandarin were added rather than make a Mandarin version of the TV series. Another TV comedy programme "Lao Niang Jiu" (Old Uncle) has been broadcast since 1999, and is still quite popular among Shanghainese residents. In 2004, a Tom and Jerry cartoon program dubbed with Shanghainese was blocked from broadcasting. Older and more rural forms of Shanghainese are still heard on the radio (catering to farming communities in the suburbs). But the Shanghainese are strongly encouraged by the government to speak Mandarin and celebrities are put on billboards with slogans like "Be a modern Shanghai person, speak Mandarin." 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

In August 2005, there was media coverage reporting that Shanghainese would be taught in secondary school. This introduced great controversy. Proponents argue that this will make the students know their hometown better and help preserve local culture. Opponents argue that this will encourage discrimination based on people's origin.

In September 2005, the Shanghai municipal government also launched a campaign to encourage Mandarin speaking in Shanghai. Among other requirements, all service-industry workers in Shanghai will be required to greet customers in Mandarin only, and pass Mandarin-fluency test by 2010. Those with bad or heavily-accented Mandarin must enroll in remedial Mandarin classes.

Common Words and Phrases in Shanghainese

Note: Chinese characters for Shanghainese are not standardized and are provided for reference only. IPA transcription is for the Middle period of modern Shanghainese (中派上海话), pronunciation of those between 20 and 60 years old.

Initials

Shanghai dialect has a set of voiced initials and exhibits unvoiced unaspirated and aspirated stops. Moreover, there are unvoiced and voiced sets of fricatives. Palatalized initials also feature in Shanghai dialect. The /l/ consonant is also particular in that there is a slight flapping of the tongue during speech, somewhat similar to the Japanese /ɺ/ (which is romanized as r). The sound may be made by lightly placing the tongue on the back of the upper set of teeth. However this flapping is not present when each character is individually pronounced. The term slack voice (or lax voice) describes the pronunciation of consonants with a glottal opening slightly wider than that occurring in normal full voice. ... In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator (such as the tongue) is thrown against another. ... Japanese writing Kanji Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Manyōgana Uses Furigana Okurigana Rōmaji The romanization of Japanese is the use of the Latin alphabet (called rōmaji )   in Japanese) to write the Japanese language, which is normally written in logographic characters borrowed from Chinese (kanji) and syllabic scripts...

Rimes

The Middle Chinese [ -m ] ending rimes in Shanghai dialect have merged with [ -n ], some of which subsequently dropped off. Some Middle Chinese [ -ŋ ] ending rime characters have become rimes with a nasalised ending, [ iã, uã, uɒ̃ ]. Middle Chinese [ -p -t -k ] rimes have become glottal stops [ -ʔ ]. Middle Chinese (Traditional Chinese: 中古漢語; Pinyin: zhōnggÇ” HànyÇ”), or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th century - 10th century). ... In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. ...

In certain variants, the [ u ] is pronounced unrounded (close back unrounded, [ ɯ ]).

Tones

The Yang Shu tone is composed of Yang registers of the Ping, Shang and Qu tone characters. The Yin Ru and Yang Ru tones are abrupt tones, and apply only to those rimes in Shanghai dialect, which end in the glottal stop [ʔ]. If the Ru tone and tones automatically related to the voiced initials (b d g z v dʑ ʑ) are not considered (as they are fixed into the syllabic structure), then the Shanghai dialect has 2 live tonal contrasts (/52/ and /335/).

Advanced tone sandhi and argument for pitch accent classification:

In polysyllabic words or set phrases, all syllables after the first lose their original tones and are pronounced based on the table below as "neutral" syllables. Even the first syllable that determines subsequent pitches is altered in a polysyllabic word. The patterns vary depending on the number of syllables in the word or set short phrase. A set phrase is an expression (i. ...

Note: H = relative high pitch; L = relative low pitch.

Notice that these patterns are quite similar to Japanese pitch accent patterns. Tone sandhi of polysyllabic compounds in the Shanghai dialect has attracted the interest of many scholars, who have previously given only careful consideration to the tone of the monosyllable while trying to describe the rules of tone sandhi for polysyllabic compounds. It has been argued that the number of tones of the Shanghai dialect, generally held to be five under previous analyses, can be reduced to only two underlying tone patterns, or tonemes, by recognizing the existence of the phoneme "voiced h" (Xiaowen Shen, University of Tokyo). Pitch accent is a kind of accent system employed in many languages around the world. ...

References

• Lance Eccles, Shanghai dialect: an introduction to speaking the contemporary language. Dunwoody Press, 1993. ISBN 1-881265-11-0. 230 pp + cassette. (An introductory course in 29 units).

1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ... Typical 60-minute Compact Cassette. ...

See also

• List of Chinese dialects
• Wu Wikipedia
• Hangzhou dialect
• Suzhou dialect

Geographic distribution of Sinitic language families within the Peoples Republic of China and the Republic of China The following is a list of Chinese dialects and languages. ... The Hangzhou dialect (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: ; pinyin: ) is spoken in the city of Hangzhou and its immediate suburbs, but excluding areas further away from Hangzhou such as Xiāoshān è•­å±± Yúháng 余杭. The number of speakers of the Hangzhou dialect has been estimated to be about 1. ... Suzhou dialect (蘇州話 / 苏州话; pinyin: sū zhōu huà) is a dialect of Wu, one of the subdivisions of Chinese spoken language. ...

External links

• Simple Shanghainese Words and Phrases: Shanghai>Learn Shanghainese
• Shanghainese Dictionary: Glossika's Searchable Shanghai Wu Dictionary
• Project to Introduce and Promote Shanghainese: Background, audio, lessons, phonology, and forums. In English. seems to be offline
• Shanghai Dialect: Resources on Shanghai dialect including a Web site (in Japanese) that gives common phrases with sound files
• Shanghainese-Mandarin Soundboard: A soundboard (requires Flash) of common Mandarin Chinese phrases with Shanghainese equivalents.