A major Sinitic branch centered on Shanghai and the lower Yangtze — its best-known variety, Shanghainese, has about 14 million speakers and a notable tonal system.
Where it’s spoken
Wu Chinese is spoken across most of Zhejiang province, Shanghai, southern Jiangsu, and parts of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian. The most prestigious varieties are Shanghainese (centered on Shanghai) and Suzhounese (the historical literary standard). Wu is the second-largest Sinitic branch after Mandarin in mainland China.
What it sounds like
Wu varieties preserve voiced obstruents that Mandarin lost (b/p/p’, for instance, as three distinct series). Tones are typically realized as register pitch contours rather than the contour tones of Mandarin, and many Wu varieties use tone sandhi rules so complex that the tonal contour of a phrase depends on the first syllable only.
How it’s written
Like all Sinitic languages, Wu is written with Chinese characters. There is no widespread Romanization standard, though academic systems (the Wugniu and Latin Phonetic Method, fakhniu) exist. Most Wu speakers write in Standard Chinese.
History
The Wu region’s economic and literary prominence made Suzhou’s variety the prestige Sinitic in late imperial China for elite arts like Kunqu opera. Shanghainese rose with the city’s 19th–20th-century commercial boom.
Find more languages by letter
Wu Chinese starts with W and ends with E. Browse other languages along the same letter.
Languages that contain a letter from "Wu Chinese":