| Shanghainese is NOT a derivative of Cantonese. The two are not even close. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Min all belong to one end of the Chinese language spectrum. Shanghainese is by itself as part of the Wu Chinese subset. Characteristics of Wu Chinese is that it retains ancient Chinese's set of initials; it has high occurence of tone sandhi (hence tones are hardly important and its existence is treated in a manner similar to modern Japanese); it has lost all of the Chinese finals (except -n); and it has short/long vowel distinction (something Mandarin speakers would not be able to comprehend). Also Shanghainese can be spoken using the following syntax: Subject-Object-Verb. This is practically impossible in Mandarin and Cantonese. Jian Shuo Wang is wrong to say that Suzhou people speak a different dialect from Shanghai. Both are Wu Chinese with VERY MINOR variations (something like British English vs. American English). There are 85 million speakers of Wu Chinese, making it the second largest Chinese dialect after Mandarin (Cantonese has 60 million speakers). Any Shanghainese speaker can easily understand and speak to a person from Suzhou, Ningbo, Wuxi, Wenzhou, etc without resorting to Mandarin. A lot of Japanese words loaned from the Chinese were from the Wu/Go (Shanghai, Suzhou) area, and hence in many cases Wu Chinese sounds very similar to Japanese. Wu Chinese is definitely the most unique dialect within the Sinitic language group. It is also much easier to pronounce than any other Chinese dialect (again tones are also irrelevant). |
Mandarin or Shanghaiese?