Wu (linguistics) History Dialects Sounds Grammar Vocabulary

Among speakers of other Chinese varieties, Wu is often subjectively judged to be soft, light, and flowing. There is even a special term used to describe the quality of Wu speech: 吳儂軟語/吴侬软语 wúnóngruǎnyǔ. The actual source of this impression is harder to place. It is likely a combination of many factors; in any case, descriptions of Wu (or its geographical predecessor) as being "soft and light" date from as far back as the Eastern Jin Dynasty, even though the Chinese dialects of that time must all have been markedly different from those of today.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Wu is a language or a dialect. Please see here for the issues surrounding this dispute.

Wu (吴语)
Spoken in:	China
Region:	Shanghai; Most of Zhejiang province; southern Jiangsu province; Xuanzhou prefecture of Anhui province
Total speakers:	77.175 million
RankingThis page tries to present a list of languages by total native speakers . Note, however, that lists such as this may vary somewhat depending upon the definition given to certain terms. In particular, the exact difference between " dialect" and " language":	10 [1]
GeneticLanguages Most languages are known to belong to language families ("families" hereforth). An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit, i. all its members derive from a common ancestor. The ancestor is very seldom known to us directly, since mos classificationLanguages Most languages are known to belong to language families ("families" hereforth). An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit, i. all its members derive from a common ancestor. The ancestor is very seldom known to us directly, since mos:	Sino-Tibetan Chinese Wu
Official status
Official language of:	-
Regulated by:	-
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zh
RFC 3066	zh-wuu
ISO 639-2(B)	chi
ISO 639-2(T)	zho
SIL	WUU

1 History

The modern Wu language can be traced back to the ancient Yue peoples centred around southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang. The Japanese Go-on (呉音) pronunciation of Chinese characters (obtained from the Wu Kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period) is from the same region of China where Wu is spoken today.

Jerry Norman's general introduction to the Chinese language and dialects, Chinese (BooksEnthsiast.com), states that northern Wu dialects are much influenced in their phonology and vocabulary from the Mandarin dialects to the north. After the Japanese occupation of northern China during the Second World War, Japanese vocabulary entered Chinese which filtered down into Wu speaking areas.

of the Chinese dialects starting from 1500 BC, and Wu's position relative to them.

2 Dialects

Wu is divided into six dialect areas:

Taihu, spoken over much of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang, including Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Ningbo
Taizhou, spoken in and around Taizhou , Zhejiang
Oujiang, spoken in and around Wenzhou, Zhejiang
Wuzhou, spoken in and around Jinhua , Zhejiang
Chu Qu, spoken in and around Lishui (Chuzhou), Zhejiang and Quzhou, Zhejiang
Xuanzhou, spoken in and around Xuancheng , Anhui

3 Sounds

Wu dialects are notable among Chinese languages in having kept voiced consonants, such as /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/, etc. (These may in fact be better described as voiceless consonants that create a voiced breathy element across the syllable: i.e. /p\/, /t\/, etc). Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese have voiced consonants.

See Suzhou dialect and Shanghai dialect for examples of Wu phonology.

4 Grammar

Wu dialects have a relatively higher amount of Subject-Object-Verb sentence structure than Mandarin or Cantonese. There is huge array of personal and demonstrative pronouns used within the Wu dialects. Sandhi is also extremely complex, and helps parse multisyllabic words and idiomatic phrases. In some cases, indirect objects are distinguished from direct objects by a voiced/voiceless distinction.

5 Vocabulary

6 References

7 External Links

Shanghainese (a Wu Chinese dialect): Introduction and Development - With dictionary, phonology, romanization, audio, comprehensive lessons, readings, and forum. In the works.
Of Wu Chinese(江南雅音话吴语) - Introduction, statistical data, vocal records, dialectmaps and literature datum of Wu.

Chinese: spoken varieties
Categories:	Mandarin \| Jin \| Wu \| Hui \| Xiang \| Gan \| Hakka \| Yue \| Pinghua \| Min
	Danzhouhua \| Shaozhou Tuhua \| Xianghua
Subcategories of Min:	Min Dong \| Min Bei \| Min Zhong \| Pu Xian \| Min Nan \| Qiong Wen \| Shao Jiang
Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many.
Comprehensive list of Chinese dialects
Official spoken varieties:	Standard Mandarin \| Standard Cantonese
Historical phonology:	Old Chinese \| Middle Chinese \| Proto-Min \| Proto-Mandarin \| Haner
Chinese: written varieties
Official written varieties:	Classical Chinese \| Vernacular Chinese

Chinese language

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