Old and new Shanghainese: 170 years of change

Shanghainese has changed faster than almost any Chinese variety, and it is still moving. A speaker born in 1930 and one born in 1995 do not have the same sound system — not a different accent, a different number of tones.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 5 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.

The three generations linguists actually use

Work on Shanghainese does not treat it as one thing. It is split into styles by the age of the speaker, and the split is old enough to have standard names: 老派, 中派 and 新派 — old, middle and new. The Chinese-language reference description gives them birth dates and, more usefully, counts:

Style	Speakers born	Finals	Tones
老派 old	around 1920	51	6
中派 middle	1940 to 1965	43	5
新派 new	broadly, under 50 today	32	5

A final is the vowel-and-ending part of a syllable, everything after the initial consonant. Going from 51 to 32 of them in two generations means that pairs of words that an older speaker keeps apart have fallen together for a younger one. Not blurred — merged.

That is a rate of change you do not often see documented inside one city and one century, and it is why the language is interesting to linguists quite apart from whether it survives.

Back to 1853

The baseline is a missionary grammar. Joseph Edkins published A Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect in 1853, and it is generally treated as the first systematic description of the language. It gives modern work something to measure against.

Measured against it, the tone system has halved. Chen and Gussenhoven’s 2015 description in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association frames the change as a move from the eight-tone system recorded by Edkins to the five tones of the language today. Their own generational split is drawn at speakers born around the 1920s against those born after 1965, with a good deal of variation inside each group.

A figure to be careful with. It is often repeated that Shanghainese has gone from 63 finals to 32 since Edkins. I could not trace that number to a source I could check, and the documented counts are the 51, 43 and 32 in the table above. The eight-to-five tone change is well sourced; the 63 is not, and this site has stopped printing it.

What a younger speaker no longer distinguishes

The sibilants, 尖团

This is the big one, and it is audible. Old-style Shanghainese keeps two series of sibilants apart where middle and new style have merged them into one palatal set. The classic minimal pairs:

酒 tsieu ‘wine, alcohol’ against 九 cieu ‘nine’
心 sin ‘heart’ against 欣 shin ‘glad’

In old-style speech those are two different initials. For a speaker with the merger, each pair sounds the same. Notice that this course teaches them apart — the spellings above are the course’s own, and tsieu and cieu are not the same syllable. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the conservative one.

The pronoun 我

The first-person pronoun is 我 ngu ‘I, me’, with the ng- that English has only in the middle of singer. Younger speakers are recorded as tending towards wu instead — which is one step closer to the Mandarin wǒ, and drops one of the most characteristic sounds in the language. Of all the changes on this page it is the one you will notice first, because the word is unavoidable.

The endings of checked syllables

Shanghainese has short, stopped syllables — the ones this course writes with a final -h, as in 一 ih ‘one’ and 勿 veh ‘not’. Older speakers are described as having kept more than one kind of stop at the end of them; younger speakers have levelled the lot to a single glottal catch. The syllables are still short and still distinct from open ones, so a learner loses nothing by learning the modern version, but it is another distinction that has quietly gone.

Why it moved so fast

Two answers, and they are different in kind.

The first is that Shanghai itself is young. The city that speaks this language grew from a county town into a metropolis in about a century, on migration, and a language absorbing that many speakers from Suzhou, Ningbo and elsewhere in one lifetime will move. Some of the most Shanghai words in the language came in from outside — 阿拉 a la ‘we, us’ arrived from Ningbo — as the page on its neighbours sets out.

The second is policy, and it is the one that explains the last thirty years. Shanghainese use was discouraged in schools from 1992, and Wikipedia’s account is blunt about the result: many children native to Shanghai can no longer speak it. The Chinese-language account dates the switch to the late 1980s rather than to 1992; the sources disagree on the year and agree on the effect. Qian Nairong, the dialectologist who has done most to document all this, put the case against it in one line: “the popularization of Mandarin doesn’t equal the ban of dialects. It doesn’t make Mandarin a more civilized language either.”

The wider social picture — how many speakers, how young, what is being done about it — is on the page on whether Shanghainese is dying. This page is only about the sounds.

So which one should you learn?

There is no authority that has declared one of the three correct, and I could not find a source that names a standard for teaching. What can be said is practical:

Learn what the materials teach, which is broadly conservative. Most dictionaries, romanisations and courses — this one included — keep distinctions that new-style speech has merged. Learning them costs nothing: you will be understood by everyone, including the speakers who no longer make them.
A merger is free to acquire and impossible to undo. If you learn 酒 tsieu ‘wine’ and 九 cieu ‘nine’ apart and your neighbours say them alike, you simply sound slightly old-fashioned. Learn them alike and you cannot later separate a distinction you never encoded.
Expect the people you talk to not to match the book. This is the real consequence. A recording says ngu, the person in front of you says wu, and neither is wrong.

The Rime input schema for Wu is a good illustration of the state of play: its own description says it covers both old-style and new-style pronunciation rather than choosing between them. Setting it up is on the typing page.

The thing worth taking away

Shanghainese is not a fixed object that is being lost a bit at a time. It is a language that has been rebuilding itself continuously for 170 years, faster than its neighbours, and the losses documented here happened alongside the gains — the loanwords, the slang, the whole vocabulary of a port city, which are on the loanwords page.

What has changed recently is that the rebuilding has stopped being fed by children. A language can lose half its tones and be perfectly healthy; that is just change. It cannot lose its young speakers and be healthy. The sound system is the interesting part of the story and not the worrying one.