Where is wu spoken

There are also some speakers in neighbouring Chinese provinces. There are local variants of the language; the standard is that of Suzhou an older city, capital of the Kingdom of Wu centuries back, and home to many scholars , not that of Shanghai. Mutual intelligibility between different Wu dialects varies; while someone from Shanghai will be able to understand the Suzhou dialect fairly easily, comprehension becomes harder in cities further afield like Wuxi and Hangzhou , while the Wenzhou dialect is completely incomprehensible.

It is therefore common for Wu speakers from different cities to communicate in Mandarin instead. This is a populous region and the number of Wu speakers is large; on Wikipedia's list of world languages by number of native speakers it ranks 13th with odd million, slightly below German but ahead of French and Italian.

On their list by total number of speakers, Wu is 18th. On both lists, it is ahead of Vietnamese, Korean, and any other Chinese language except Mandarin.

Few travellers are likely to need or want to learn Wu. Throughout China, Mandarin has been the main language of government, education, media, and entertainment, for over half a century.

Nearly all Wu speakers have at least some Mandarin as well, and the educated ones are generally completely fluent. Also, the major cities where Wu is the main local language — Shanghai , Suzhou , Ningbo and Hangzhou — are all quite prosperous and full of immigrants or temporary migrant workers who come from areas where Wu is not spoken. As anywhere else in China, Mandarin is the lingua franca for communication between people from different areas. Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

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Professional networking 8. Communities for students, young professionals, and women 9. Volunteer opportunities Coming soon! Shanghainese, also known as the Shanghai or Hu dialect, is a form of Wu dialect spoken in the central districts of Shanghai and in the surrounding region. Shanghainese is a proper representative dialect of Northern Wu and in English "Shanghainese" sometimes refers to all Wu dialects.

With nearly 14 million speakers, it is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin. Shanghai did not become a regional centre of commerce until it was opened to foreign investment during the late Qing dynasty.

Consequently, dialects spoken around Shanghai had long been subordinate to those spoken around Jiaxing and later Suzhou. In the late 19th century, most vocabulary of the Shanghai region had been a hybrid between Northern Jiangsu and Ningbo dialects.

Since the s, owing to the growth of Shanghai's economy, Shanghainese has become one of the fastest-developing dialects of Wu Chinese, undergoing rapid changes and quickly replacing Suzhou dialect as the prestige dialect of the region.