Shanghainese pronouns
Not one of the six Shanghainese pronouns is the Mandarin word. Learn them and you can identify the language from a single sentence — which is more than the writing system will ever tell you.
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 paradigm
Six words. No gender, no case, no agreement: the same form is subject and object, and the third person covers he, she and it alike.
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person | 我 ngu ‘I, me’ | 阿拉 a la ‘we, us’ |
| 2nd person | 侬 non ‘you’ | 㑚 na ‘you (plural)’ |
| 3rd person | 伊 yi ‘he, she, it’ | 伊拉 yi la ‘they, them’ |
The plurals of the first and third person are built with a suffix — 伊 yi ‘he’ plus -la gives 伊拉 yi la ‘they’ — while 㑚 na ‘you (plural)’ is its own word. Shanghainese is not a pro-drop language: unlike some languages you cannot simply leave the pronoun out.
Why 侬 is the fastest tell in the language
侬 non ‘you’ is the single most useful diagnostic word in Shanghainese. It is in a huge proportion of ordinary speech — every question you ask someone, every thank-you, since 谢谢侬 zia zia non ‘thank you’ carries it — and it is not the Mandarin word for you.
That matters more here than in most languages, because Shanghainese is written with Mandarin’s characters. A written sentence gives almost nothing away: the characters for person, water and time are the same in both. The pronouns are the exception, and they are visible on the page as well as audible.
| Meaning | Shanghainese | Mandarin |
|---|---|---|
| I, me | 我 ngu | 我 wǒ |
| you | 侬 non | 你 nǐ |
| he, she | 伊 yi | 他 tā |
| we | 阿拉 a la | 我们 wǒmen |
| you (plural) | 㑚 na | 你们 nǐmen |
| they | 伊拉 yi la | 他们 tāmen |
The first row is the trap. The character is the same — 我 in both — but it is said ngu, not wǒ. Younger Shanghai speakers are recorded as tending towards wu, which is a step closer to Mandarin. Every other row differs in the character too, so a sentence containing 你 nǐ or 他们 tāmen is Mandarin, whatever else is around it.
Where 阿拉 came from
阿拉 a la ‘we, us’ is the word Shanghai is known by across China — it turns up in the names of shops and in the way other Chinese cities imitate Shanghai speech. It is also not originally from Shanghai.
Older Shanghainese used 我伲 ngu nyi ‘we’, and you will still hear that from older speakers. 阿拉 a la ‘we’ came in from the speech of Ningbo, about a hundred miles down the coast, carried by the very large Ningbo migration into Shanghai as the city grew — and it displaced the local form. Xu and Tang’s 1988 description of urban Shanghainese records the borrowing.
It is a good illustration of what Shanghainese is: a city language assembled over about a century and a half, in which some of the most characteristically Shanghai words arrived from elsewhere. How the city’s speech sits among its neighbours is on the Suzhou, Ningbo and Hangzhou page.
Whether 阿拉 a la ‘we’ includes the person you are speaking to is a point the reference grammars disagree on. Zhu (2006) says Shanghainese has no separate inclusive form; Hashimoto (1971) reads 阿拉 as inclusive. In practice nobody will misunderstand you either way.
Possessives
Add 个 gheh ‘’s’ to the pronoun. There are no separate possessive words to learn:
- 我个书 ngu gheh syu ‘my book’
- 侬个铜钿 non gheh don die ‘your money’
- 伊拉个屋里 yi la gheh oh li ‘their home’
That particle is itself one of the words that separates the two languages: Shanghainese uses 个 gheh ‘’s’ where Mandarin uses 的. Its pronunciation is a glottalised weakening of the reading you would otherwise expect for the character, which is part of why it is written several different ways. Possession is only one of the five jobs it does — it is also the general classifier, a nominaliser and a definite article — and they are set out on the classifiers page.
Reflexives
One word for every person: 自家 zy ka ‘oneself’. There is no series of forms to match to the subject.
- 伊自家做。 yi zy ka tsu ‘he did it himself’
- 我自家去。 ngu zy ka chi ‘I’ll go myself’
Putting them to work
Pronouns are the first thing worth learning in this language, because they let you build a sentence immediately and they let you recognise one. A handful of examples using nothing but the paradigm above and the negative 勿 veh ‘not’:
- 我勿晓得。 ngu veh shiau teh ‘I don’t know’
- 侬是啥人？ non zy sa nyin ‘who are you?’
- 伊拉勿来。 yi la veh le ‘they’re not coming’
- 阿拉侪是上海人。 a la ze zy zaon he nyin ‘we are all Shanghai people’
- 㑚欢喜伐？ na huoe shi va ‘do you (all) like it?’
Two things a sentence needs that are not on this page: the classifier that has to sit between a number and a noun, which is on the classifiers page, and the numbers themselves, on the numbers page.
The rest of the grammar — the copula, negation, aspect, where things are — is on the grammar page, and it is not much longer than this one. The words for asking who and what, which behave like pronouns and stay where the answer would go, are on the question words page.
Sources
- Zhu, Xiaonong (2006). A Grammar of Shanghai Wu, pp. 64–66. LINCOM Europa. Cited in Wikipedia: Shanghainese, pronouns.
- Hashimoto, M. J. (1971). A Guide to the Shanghai Dialect, p. 249. Princeton University Press.
- Xu, Baohua and Tang, Zhenzhu (1988). 《上海市区方言志》, p. 418, on 阿拉 originating in Ningbo speech.
- Chao, Yuen Ren (1967). Contrastive Aspects of the Wu Dialects. Language 43(1), p. 99, on generational variation in the plural pronouns.
- Wiktionary: 阿拉