Shanghainese and Wu Chinese

Some poking around Wikipedia led me to an interesting discovery that Wu Chinese, the name for the broad family of dialects spoken in Shanghai and its neighboring provinces, has more speakers than Cantonese. (Chinese dialects use the same characters, but the spoken language is mutually unintelligible, as different as German and English, and there can be some grammar and lexical differences. There’s a number of dialects within Wu Chinese, including a Changzhou dialect.) Although it’s far outnumbered by Mandarin speakers, Wu Chinese, with 77 million speakers, ranks second in China and enough to be somewhere around 10-15th among world languages.

It’s puzzling because Cantonese seems so much more widespread and influential, while Shanghainese is little known abroad, is not taught in schools, and has little media such as radio and films. Some further digging revealed why.

The Yangtze River valley is densely populated, so there have always been a lot of native speakers of Wu Chinese, but the language is dying out quickly because of the movement of people within China and the government’s standardization of the Beijing dialect – Mandarin or putonghua. Instruction of local dialects in schools and its use in spoken media is heavily restricted in and around Shanghai, but less so in the Cantonese areas of Guangdong and Hong Kong, which is more or less autonomous, so Cantonese is flourishing there. And the film industry in Hong Kong is extensive – it was in recent decades one of the biggest film centers in the world – and there are millions of overseas Cantonese speakers.