Wikipedia
Shanghainese, also known as the Shanghai or Hu language, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of Shanghai and in the surrounding region. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin, sharing just 29% lexical similarity with the Mandarin heard in Beijing.
In English, "Shanghainese" sometimes refers to all Wu dialects, although they are only partially intelligible with one another. Shanghainese proper is a representative dialect of Northern Wu; it contains vocabulary and expressions from the entire Northern Wu area of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang. With nearly 14 million speakers, Shanghainese is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese. It once served as the lingua franca of the entire Yangtze River Delta region.
Shanghainese is rich in vowels (twelve of which are phonemic) and in consonants. Like other northern Wu dialects, the Shanghai dialect has voiced initials . Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese has voiced initial stops or affricates. The Shanghainese tonal system is also significantly different from other Chinese varieties, sharing more similarities with the Japanese pitch accent. Shanghainese has two level tonal contrasts (high and low), while Mandarin and Cantonese are typical of contour tonal languages.
Shanghainese may refer to:
- Shanghainese people
- Shanghainese dialect