Is Shanghainese a language or a dialect?
By the usual linguistic test, whether speakers can understand each other, Shanghainese is a different language from Mandarin. It is still routinely called a dialect, and the reasons have more to do with writing, history and politics than with how it sounds.
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.
What ‘dialect’ normally means
In English, a dialect is usually a form of a language that speakers of other forms can still follow, the way Scottish and Texan English speakers can talk to each other. The test is mutual intelligibility. When two groups cannot understand each other’s everyday speech, linguists generally treat what they speak as separate languages, however closely related.
Shanghainese fails that test against Mandarin. When Tang Chaoju and Vincent van Heuven measured intelligibility between Chinese varieties in 2009, listeners from Beijing understood only 26% of the individual words, and 5% of the sentences, of Suzhou Wu, the close relative of Shanghainese that their study included. Figures like those describe people who cannot follow each other, not people who share a language.
Where Shanghainese sits
Shanghainese belongs to Wu Chinese, one of the major branches of the Chinese language family alongside Mandarin, Yue (which includes Cantonese), Min, Hakka, Xiang, Gan and others. The international language code standard, ISO 639-3, gives Wu its own code, wuu, and treats it as an individual language within the Chinese macrolanguage. Wu had around 81 million first-language speakers in a 2019 estimate.
Within Wu, Shanghainese belongs to the northern Taihu group. The Language Atlas of China places it in the Su–Hu–Jia subgroup of Taihu Wu, named after Suzhou, Shanghai and Jiaxing. So in one sense Shanghainese really is a dialect: a dialect of Wu, alongside the speech of Suzhou and Jiaxing. What it is not is a dialect of Mandarin.
The word that causes the confusion
In Chinese, Shanghainese is a 方言 fāngyán. The word is made of fāng, ‘place’, and yán, ‘speech’, and it is normally translated as dialect. But the Chinese word does not carry the English assumption that its varieties are mutually intelligible. It covers the speech of a single county and whole branches of the family spoken by tens of millions of people.
In 1991 the sinologist Victor Mair argued that the translation itself was the problem, and proposed topolect, a neutral word for the speech of a place, as a more exact English equivalent. He described Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese and the other major groups as mutually unintelligible tongues, and noted that Wu has its Shanghai and Suzhou forms.
Why it is still called a dialect
Several things keep the label in place. The Chinese varieties share one writing system and one literary tradition, so for most of history an educated reader from Shanghai and one from Beijing could read the same texts even if they could not talk to each other. China also has a single national standard. The 1982 constitution commits the state to promoting 普通话 pǔtōnghuà, the common spoken language, and the national language law makes it the basic language of schooling and broadcasting. Calling the other varieties dialects fits that picture of one language with many local forms.
None of that changes how the languages work in the mouth and the ear, and it is a good illustration of a line first published by the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich in 1945, who credited it to a member of his audience: a language is a dialect with an army and navy.
So which is it?
Both words can be defended, as long as it is clear what each is being compared with. Shanghainese is a dialect of Wu. Wu and Mandarin are, by the standard of mutual intelligibility, different languages. Calling Shanghainese a dialect of Mandarin is simply wrong: a Mandarin speaker cannot understand it, and a learner who treats it as Mandarin with a local accent will never learn to understand it either.
Its speakers call it 上海闲话 zaon he ghae gho ‘Shanghai speech’. It shares its script with Mandarin, but not its sounds, its commonest words or its grammatical particles, and it has to be learned as a language in its own right. Shanghainese vs Mandarin shows what that means in practice.
Sources
- ISO 639-3 code table: wuu, Wu Chinese (SIL International)
- Tang, C. and van Heuven, V. J. (2009). Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested. Lingua 119(5).
- Mair, V. H. (1991). What is a Chinese ‘dialect/topolect’? Sino-Platonic Papers 29.
- Wikidata: Wu Chinese, number of speakers (Ethnologue, 2019)
- Wikipedia (Chinese): 吴语, classification in the Language Atlas of China
- Wikipedia: A language is a dialect with an army and navy
- Law of the People’s Republic of China on the National Common Language and Script, revised 2025