Is Shanghainese dying?

Not in the sense of vanishing soon: millions of people speak it every day. But Shanghainese is losing its youngest speakers in the city that gave it its name, and the surveys that have measured this all point the same way.

Updated 13 September 2026 · 4 min read

How many people speak it

Nobody has an exact count. Wu Chinese as a whole had about 81 million first-language speakers in a 2019 estimate. For Shanghainese itself, the figure usually quoted is 15.86 million, from 2012, but that is an estimate of the population of the area where it is spoken, suburban varieties included, not a survey of who actually speaks it.

Shanghai had 24.87 million residents at the 2020 census, and 42% of them, about 10.5 million people, were residents from other provinces. A city in which four people in ten come from elsewhere needs a common language, and that language is Mandarin.

Why it declined

Mandarin has been promoted as China’s common language for seventy years. A State Council directive in 1956 required schools across the country to teach Putonghua. The 1982 constitution commits the state to promoting it, and the national language law, in force since 2001, makes it the basic language of school teaching and of broadcasting.

Shanghai applied this firmly. The linguist Qian Nairong has said that from 1992 pupils were told not to speak Shanghainese even outside lessons, and that some Shanghainese radio and television programmes were told to stop. In 2016 the news site Sixth Tone reported that pupils were routinely punished for speaking it, including one who in 2011 was made to write an 800-word apology. The city’s own language regulations, in force since 2006, name Putonghua as the basic language not only of teaching but of school group activities, and let radio and television presenters use dialect only with official approval. A national notice at the end of 2013 told presenters to use standard Putonghua unless a programme specially required otherwise.

What the surveys show

The surveys measure different things, so they cannot be lined up into a neat trend, but they agree on the direction:

In 2012 the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences surveyed 1,496 schoolchildren in three districts and found that only about 60% of the pupils born in Shanghai fully understood Shanghainese and could basically speak it.
A 2013 telephone survey of 1,008 residents aged 13 and over, by the Shanghai Statistics Bureau, found that 81.4% could speak it at least somewhat. Shanghai-born 13-to-20-year-olds rated their own listening and speaking lower than any other age group did.
A survey of 1,383 students from 14 schools, reported in 2014, found that 46.3% named Putonghua as their first language and 35.2% named Shanghainese. More of them spoke Putonghua with their mothers, 53.9%, than Shanghainese, 33.2%.
Street surveys in 2016 and 2017 found that 96% of Shanghai-born adults spoke Shanghainese fluently, but only 70% of those under 25, and only about 60% of the under-25s spoke it at home.

Together they describe a language that almost every older Shanghainese person speaks well, that most young Shanghainese people still understand, and that many young people no longer use at home.

It is changing as well as shrinking

Shanghainese has always changed quickly. Qian Nairong has calculated that since Joseph Edkins recorded it in 1853, it has gone from 63 finals, the vowel-and-ending part of a syllable, to 32, and from eight tones to five. Younger speakers have also lost distinctions their grandparents keep, such as the old contrast between two sets of sibilant consonants.

What is being done

There has been a real, if patchy, effort to keep Shanghainese audible in public life:

Buses. From 2013, Shanghai began gradually introducing Shanghainese stop announcements on its bus routes.
The metro. Line 16 was the first metro line to announce stops in Shanghainese, alongside Mandarin and English, and Line 17 became the second in October 2020.
Kindergartens. From 2013, about two dozen kindergartens piloted using Shanghainese in play and daily routines.
Television. The local news programme 新闻坊 has a weekly segment broadcast in Shanghainese.
Drama. Wong Kar-wai’s 2023 television series Blossoms Shanghai (繁花) was made in a Shanghainese version as well as a Mandarin one.

So, is it dying?

Not yet, and not quickly. Wu Chinese as a whole is not classified as endangered: Ethnologue rates it as a developing language, and Glottolog lists it as not endangered. But those ratings describe some 80 million Wu speakers across a large region, not the speech of central Shanghai, where the pressure is greatest.

The fair answer is that Shanghainese is secure among older generations and weakening among younger ones. Languages survive when parents speak them to their children, and the surveys suggest that fewer young people in Shanghai grow up speaking it than their parents did. Whether that continues will depend less on bus announcements and television than on what families speak at home.