Wu (linguistics)

The Wu (吳方言 pinyin wú fāng yán; 吳語 pinyin wú yǔ) spoken variations of the Chinese language are spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang; and the municipality of Shanghai. Wu includes Shanghainese, Suzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Yongkang and Shaoxing dialects. As of 1991, there are 87 million speakers of Wu Chinese, making it the second largest form of Chinese after Mandarin Chinese (which has 800 million speakers).

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.

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 (ISBN 0521228093), 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.

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

Dialects

Variations of Wu Chinese

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

Population of Wu Chinese

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.

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.

Vocabulary

References

External Links

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

zh-cn:吴方言