How Shanghainese is written, and why there’s no standard

Shanghainese is written in Chinese characters, and most of it is not controversial at all. The disagreements are concentrated in a few dozen of the commonest words, and in how to spell the language in the Latin alphabet.

Updated 13 September 2026 · 3 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Shanghainese examples play the recordings from Verbavia’s course, made with a Shanghainese voice; Mandarin examples play a Mandarin voice.

Most of it is written exactly like Mandarin

The great majority of Shanghainese words are written with the same characters Mandarin uses, with the same meanings. 辰光 zen kuaon ‘time’ has one spelling and nobody argues about it, and nobody argues about 人 nyin ‘person’ or 水 syu ‘water’ either. Of the 3,000 most frequent characters in the list Verbavia’s course is built on, only 41 have genuinely competing spellings.

Most of those 41 are grammatical words that turn up in nearly every sentence, which is why the problem feels bigger than it is.

The words without a settled character

Written Chinese was standardised around the literary language, and some everyday Shanghainese words have no traditional character that fits them. Writers cope in three ways: they borrow a character for its sound, they use an older or rarer character, or they make a new one. The result is a small set of words you will see written several ways:

Word	Usual spelling	Other spellings you will see
not	勿 veh	弗
question particle	伐 va	𠲎
this	搿 geh	个, 格, 葛, and the older 迭
at, in	垃拉 laeh la	勒拉
possessive particle	个 gheh	额, a spelling influenced by Mandarin

The question particle shows why this matters in practice. The character made specifically for it, 𠲎, adds the ‘mouth’ component to 伐, but it sits in a Unicode block that some devices do not display and many keyboards cannot type. So most people write plain 伐 va, a character that in Mandarin means ‘to cut down’.

Other words are written by squeezing two characters into one. 覅 viau ‘don’t’ is 勿 veh ‘not’ and 要 iau ‘want’ run together, on the page as well as in the mouth.

A long history of trying

People have been writing Shanghainese down since Shanghai became a major port. In the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries developed Latin-alphabet spellings for it, and Joseph Edkins published A Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect in 1853. Missionaries even devised a syllabary for Shanghainese, similar in principle to Japanese kana, although it was never widely used.

Literature took a different route. The novel 海上花列传 (The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai), serialised from 1892 and published complete in 1894, is set in Shanghai, but its dialogue is written in Suzhou Wu rather than in Shanghainese.

Today the largest body of written Wu is Wu Chinese Wikipedia, which launched in 2006 and had 48,308 articles in September 2026.

Three romanisations, none of them official

There is no Shanghainese equivalent of Mandarin pinyin, which every Chinese school teaches. Instead there are several competing systems, all created without government backing:

Wu Association romanisation, developed by Wu language enthusiasts in the mid-2000s. Verbavia uses it, because the way it marks voicing and the glottal stop predicts tone well.
Wugniu, from around 2016, now the most common system online.
Qian Nairong’s Shanghainese pinyin, based on Mandarin pinyin and adopted at the first International Symposium on the Shanghai Dialect in 2006. It is used in the 2008 pinyin-input edition of 上海话大词典, a dictionary of Shanghainese.

The systems disagree often. Across 3,000 characters, Wu Association romanisation and Wugniu spell 32% of them differently:

Character	Wu Association	Wugniu
一 one	ih	iq
人 person	nyin	gnin
个 particle	gheh	gheq

Native speakers were never taught any of them. Most Shanghainese speakers learned to read and write in Mandarin, and many find a romanisation of their own language unfamiliar.

Why there is no standard

A standard needs someone to set it and a reason to follow it. China’s national language law defines the national common language as Putonghua, written in standardised characters, and allows other varieties only in particular settings such as approved broadcasting, drama, teaching and research. Shanghai’s own language regulations, in force since 2006, say nothing about how Shanghainese should be written. No government body has published a written standard, and schools teach reading and writing in Mandarin.

What holds written Shanghainese together instead is habit, dictionaries and the online community. Most writers agree on most words, and argue about the rest.

Typing it

The everyday obstacle is the keyboard. Standard Chinese input methods work by typing Mandarin pinyin and picking a character, so a Shanghainese writer has to think of each word’s Mandarin sound first, and words with no Mandarin reading are hard to reach at all. Dedicated input schemes do exist, such as the Wugniu schemes for the open-source Rime input method, which run on computers and phones, but they have to be installed separately.