Shanghainese family words: mother, father, grandparents

If you grew up hearing a grandparent called something you cannot find in a Mandarin dictionary, this page is probably why. The Shanghainese words for the closest relatives are not the Mandarin ones, and they are the words a family keeps longest.

Updated 21 September 2026 · 4 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.

Mother and father

Start with the one that surprises Mandarin speakers. The Shanghainese word for mother is 姆妈 'm 'ma ‘mum, mother’, not 妈妈 — it begins with a syllabic m, a hum before the vowel arrives. Wiktionary records it for Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou alike, so it is a Wu word rather than a Shanghai one.

娘 nyan ‘mother’ on its own is the older word and still current. And 爷娘 ya nyan ‘parents’ is worth a look: it is father-and-mother, where Mandarin builds the same idea out of the literary 父母. Note what 爷 means there — father. Hold that thought, because it moves a generation in the next section.

Grandparents, which is what most people came here for

Chinese kinship splits the paternal from the maternal side, and Shanghainese does it with words Mandarin does not use.

Two things to notice. The first is that 阿娘 a nyan ‘father’s mother’ is a generation up from 娘 nyan ‘mother’ — the same character, the 阿 prefix, and suddenly it is your grandmother rather than your mother. The same shift happens with 爷 ya ‘father’ and 阿爷 a ya ‘father’s father’. If you half-remember a word and are not sure which generation it belonged to, that is why.

The second is 老爹 lau tia ‘father’s father’, which is the form Wiktionary lists first for Shanghai and which a Mandarin speaker would never guess, since 爹 means dad in Mandarin. In Shanghai it is the grandfather.

The row about 外婆

In 2018 a Shanghai primary-school textbook replaced 外婆 nga bu ‘mother’s mother’ with 姥姥, the northern Mandarin word, apparently on the grounds that 外婆 was dialectal. Shanghai did not take it well, and the row made international news.

It is a small story that contains the whole argument. 外婆 nga bu ‘mother’s mother’ is not obscure; it is what people across southern China say, and in Shanghai it is what you call the woman herself. Substituting the northern form in a Shanghai schoolbook told a city of children that the word their family uses is the incorrect one. The education authority reversed it.

The rest of the family

And the word for a child, which is pure Wu: 小囡 siau noe ‘child, kid’, with 囡囡 noe noe ‘little one’ as the affectionate doubling. The character 囡 — a child enclosed — is a Wu character, glossed by Wiktionary as child and daughter in Wu and proposed as a contraction of 女儿. 囡囡 is marked chiefly northern Wu. If someone in your family was called 囡囡, it was not a name; it was darling.

The 阿 that is not the other 阿

You will have noticed 阿 on the front of half these words. Wiktionary describes it as a prefix “used in terms of address (kinship terms, surnames, given names), usually to express familiarity or friendliness”, traditionally in southern varieties. So 阿哥 a ku ‘elder brother’ and 阿奶 a na ‘father’s mother’ carry a warmth that the bare noun does not.

One caution, because it trips people up. The 阿 in 阿拉 a la ‘we, us’ is a different word — Wiktionary derives it from 我, I, with 拉 as a plural marker, and it came into Shanghai from Ningbo. It is not the affectionate prefix, however identical it looks. That story is on the pronouns page.

Why this is the vocabulary that survives

Nobody has measured it, so treat what follows as this site’s observation rather than a finding. But the pattern is hard to miss: in a family that has largely switched to Mandarin, the kinship words are often the last things left. You call your grandmother what you have always called her, in a household where the rest of the conversation moved years ago.

Which is exactly why diaspora readers arrive at a page like this one. The word is remembered as a sound and never seen written, so it cannot be looked up, and the Mandarin dictionary does not have it because it was never a Mandarin word.

The documentation itself shows the erosion in progress. Wiktionary’s entries for the grandparent terms mark 奶奶 and 阿孃 as what younger Shanghai speakers say, beside the older 阿奶 and 爾奶 — the Mandarin form moving in within living memory. That is the same generational change described on the old and new Shanghainese page, happening in the most intimate corner of the vocabulary.

If you are trying to recover a word, two things help. Say it aloud rather than trying to spell it, and compare it against the table above by sound. And ask about the generation, not just the person: a great many of these words differ only by which generation they point at, and 阿娘 a nyan ‘father’s mother’ against 娘 nyan ‘mother’ is the clearest case of it on the page.

Sources

1. Wiktionary: 姆媽 — Wu (Northern, Taihu) Wugniu 1m-ma1, with the Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou synonyms for mother
2. Wiktionary: 爺爺 — the Shanghai row giving 老爹, 爺爺, 祖父 and 阿爺
3. Wiktionary: 奶奶 — the Shanghai row giving 爾奶, 阿奶, and 奶奶 and 阿孃 for younger speakers
4. Wiktionary: 阿哥 — elder brother, chiefly Cantonese, Hakka, Min and Wu; Shanghai Wugniu 7aq-ku1
5. Wiktionary: 娘舅 — maternal uncle, Shanghai Wugniu 6gnian-jieu
6. Wiktionary: 娘娘 — the Shanghai row for father’s sister
7. Wiktionary: 囡 and 囡囡 — Wu for child and daughter; 囡囡 chiefly northern Wu, Shanghai Wugniu 1noe-noe1
8. Wiktionary: 阿 — the prefix used in terms of address to express familiarity
9. Wiktionary: 阿拉 — from 我 with the plural 拉, carried into Shanghai from Ningbo
10. Quartz: A debate over the word for grandmother in Shanghai schools (2018)
11. Wikipedia: Chinese kinship — the paternal and maternal split, and the Erya
12. Wu Chinese Wikipedia: 祖父母