"Nóng H?!" – Getting to Grips with Shanghai's Mother Tonguehange UnderwaylianIMF shares Institute

Walking the streets of Shanghai as a Mandarin speaker, the chances are that you won’t understand everything you hear. That, for a student of this notoriously tricky tongue, may not be much of a surprise, but in Shanghai and its surrounding regions, the language you tend to hear among locals is not standard Mandarin. Shanghainese (or shànghǎihuà – 上海话) is a strain of the northern Wu dialect (吴语) which is spoken across the Zhejiang province, southern Jiangsu, and parts of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian.

Most Shanghai natives learn Shanghainese as their mother tongue, but are bilingual in Mandarin, so learning shànghǎihuà isn’t necessary. However, if you live in Shanghai and want to really get into local culture, it’s good to know a bit about the history of the dialect, and maybe get a few words under your belt to impress the taxi driver on your next jaunt around town.

Photo: C. Yu

Historically, Mandarin has been made up of many different dialects – unsurprising when you think about just how big China is. Speakers of the Wu tongue used to make up at least one fifth of the population, but the Taiping Rebellion decimated that figure, and modern speakers make up only around one twentieth. Shanghai is the stronghold and representative city of modern Wu, and there are 13 million native speakers of shànghǎihuà – as many as Swedish, which is quite impressive when you think about it.

Like the standard forms of pretty much all major languages across the world, the process of standardising Mandarin was long and complicated. Basically, the written form has always been standard, thanks to court literature, but the spoken form differed so much from region to region that two people from neighbouring provinces would have had trouble understanding each other. It wasn’t just among minority groups either; the Han majority, which numbers 90% of the total population, spoke wildly different tongues within the whole.

Standardisation efforts were made in the Ming Dynasty, during which the local dialect of Nanjing was used as a benchmark. Later, as power moved to Beijing in the Qing Dynasty, běijīnghuà was the standard, and was known as guóy? – ‘national language’. It became the official language of China in 1955 and was called p?tōnghuà – ‘common language’.

Photo: Ms. President

Although p?tōnghuà and shànghǎihuà come from the same root language, their differences are much greater than the disparity between the Romance languages of Europe. For example, a Spanish speaker would be able to converse pretty efficiently with his Portuguese neighbour. This is impossible between a Shanghainese speaker and a non-speaker. There are only two tones in Shanghainese, as opposed to Mandarin’s four, and shànghǎihuà’s word order is more like Japanese’s, favouring subject-verb-object sentence structures.