Shanghainese grammar: how sentences actually work

Shanghainese grammar is close enough to Mandarin’s that you can lean on it, and different in enough specific places to give you away. These are the places.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 6 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.

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Word order is subject–verb–object, like Mandarin and like English, and nothing inflects: no tense endings, no plurals, no cases, no agreement. Zhu (2006) describes Shanghainese as an isolating language that marks neither tense, person, case, number nor gender. What does the work instead is a small set of particles, and those are what this page is about.

Not covered here, because they have their own lessons in the course: the question particle 伐 va — which, with the six question words, has its own page — the object marker 拿 'ne, 拨 peh for giving and for the passive, and 老 lau for ‘very’. The words that differ most between the two languages are set out on the Shanghainese vs Mandarin page.

The pronouns, in full

Six words, no gender, no case. The third person is one word for he, she and it, and the plurals are formed with a suffix rather than being separate words.

	Singular	Plural
1st	我 ngu ‘I, me’	阿拉 a la ‘we, us’
2nd	侬 non ‘you’	㑚 na ‘you (plural)’
3rd	伊 yi ‘he, she, it’	伊拉 yi la ‘they’

Not one of those six is the Mandarin word, which is why a single sentence of Shanghainese is recognisable immediately. 阿拉 a la ‘we’ in particular is the word Shanghai is known by elsewhere in China — and it is a borrowing, taken from Ningbo speech; older Shanghainese used 我伲 ngu nyi ‘we’, which you will still hear from older speakers. Whether 阿拉 a la ‘we’ includes the person being spoken to is a point the reference grammars actually disagree on: Zhu (2006) says Shanghainese has no separate inclusive form, Hashimoto (1971) reads 阿拉 a la ‘we’ as inclusive.

Possession is the pronoun plus 个 gheh ‘’s’: 我个书 ngu gheh syu ‘my book’. And the reflexive is 自家 zy ka ‘oneself’, used for all persons alike — 伊自家做。 yi zy ka tsu ‘he did it himself’.

The copula, and when to leave it out

是 zy ‘to be’ links two nouns, and it is one of the few very common words that Shanghainese and Mandarin share:

搿个是啥？ geh gheh zy sa ‘what is this?’
我勿是老师。 ngu veh zy lau sy ‘I am not a teacher’
㑚侪是学生。 na ze zy ghoh san ‘you are all students’

It does not appear before an adjective. To say something is good you do not link it to anything; the adjective is the predicate by itself, usually with a degree word in front of it. That is the same pattern as Mandarin’s 很, and the Shanghainese degree words are 老 lau ‘very’ and 交关 ciau kuae ‘a lot’.

Saying no

The everyday negator is 勿 veh ‘not’, which goes in front of the verb, and the verb ‘to not have’ is 呒没 m meh ‘there isn’t’. Neither is the Mandarin word, and between them they appear in an enormous proportion of ordinary speech.

伊拉勿来。 yi la veh le ‘they are not coming’
我呒没铜钿。 ngu m meh don die ‘I have no money’
我听勿懂。 ngu thin veh ton ‘I can’t understand it’

The third of those shows a pattern worth having early: the negative goes inside the verb phrase, between the action and its result. Hearing and understanding are two halves of one idea — 听 thin ‘to listen’ plus 懂 ton ‘to understand’ — and the negative splits them. The positive is 我听得懂。 ngu thin teh ton ‘I can understand it’.

The contracted negatives

Three more negatives are each a squeezed-together pair of words, and they are written with characters invented for the purpose:

Word	Means	From
覅 viau ‘don’t, no need’	don’t want to, don’t	勿 veh ‘not’ + 要 iau ‘to want’
甮 vion ‘no need to’	there is no need	勿 veh ‘not’ + 用 yon ‘to use’
朆 fen ‘didn’t, hasn’t’	did not, has not	勿 veh ‘not’ + 曾 zen ‘ever’

So 我覅。 ngu viau ‘I don’t want it’ is a whole refusal in two syllables, 甮去。 vion chi ‘no need to go’ waves something away, and 伊朆来。 yi fen le ‘he didn’t come’ is the plain past negative. These are the words that make Shanghainese sound fast.

Where things are

垃拉 laeh la ‘at, in’ does the work of Mandarin 在, and it is both the verb ‘to be somewhere’ and the preposition ‘at’:

伊垃拉屋里。 yi laeh la oh li ‘he is at home’
书垃拉桌子浪。 syu laeh la tsoh tsy laon ‘the book is on the table’

Two things there are not Mandarin. 浪 laon ‘on top of’ is the suffix that marks a surface, where Mandarin uses 上. And 里向 li shian ‘inside’ marks an interior, where Mandarin uses 里. Existence is 有 yeu ‘there is’, as in 屋里有人伐？ oh li yeu nyin va ‘is anyone at home?’, and its negative is 呒没 m meh ‘there isn’t’ rather than anything built from 勿 veh ‘not’.

The same word family also marks the progressive, which is the next section — and that overlap is not a coincidence. Being somewhere and being in the middle of something are one idea in this language.

Aspect: when things happen, without tenses

There is no tense. What Shanghainese marks instead is aspect — whether an action is going on, finished, or has been experienced before. Zhu (2006) counts six aspects that are not seriously disputed, although the particles vary by generation and different analyses give anywhere from four to twelve. What follows is the working set; the whole system, with the negative of each and the generational split, is on the aspect page.

Going on now

勒海 leh he ‘in the middle of’ in front of the verb:

伊勒海吃饭。 yi leh he chih vae ‘he is eating’
伊勒海写字。 yi leh he sia zy ‘she is writing’

Put the same particle after the verb instead and it stops meaning ‘in progress’ and starts meaning ‘and the result is still there’. The position does the work, not the word.

Finished

Three markers, and they are not interchangeable.

脱 theh attaches to the verb and means the thing is done and gone, like Mandarin 掉: 我吃脱哉。 ngu chih theh tse ‘I’ve eaten it up’
仔 tsy marks a completed action, like Mandarin 了 after a verb: 伊来仔。 yi le tsy ‘he came’
哉 tse closes the sentence and announces that something has changed, like the other Mandarin 了: 饭吃好哉。 vae chih hau tse ‘dinner’s been eaten’

仔 tsy is the one to watch. Zhu records it as dated, with younger speakers reaching for 了 instead under Mandarin influence — so which you hear is a fair guide to the age of the speaker.

Ever, at some point

过 ku ‘to have done’ after the verb says you have done something at least once: 我去过上海。 ngu chi ku zaon he ‘I have been to Shanghai’. Same job as Mandarin 过, different sound.

Result complements

A very large amount of Shanghainese is built by putting a result straight after a verb, with nothing in between. The verb says what you did; the next word says how it came out.

我看好哉。 ngu khoe hau tse ‘I have finished reading it’ — 看 khoe ‘to look’ plus 好 hau ‘well, done’
我听勿懂。 ngu thin veh ton ‘I can’t understand it’ — the negative inserted into the same frame

This is worth practising early, because it is how the language expresses a great deal that English does with separate verbs, and because the negative’s position inside the pair is the part learners get wrong.

What to take from all this

If you know some Mandarin, the structure will feel familiar and the particles will not. Nearly every word in this article is a different word from its Mandarin equivalent while doing the same job — which is the whole shape of the problem, and the reason a Mandarin speaker can read Shanghainese on the page and lose it entirely in the air.

If you know no Chinese at all, the good news is that there is very little to memorise here. No conjugation, no agreement, no cases. A dozen particles, learned in sentences, is most of the grammar.