Which Shanghainese romanisation should you use?

Mandarin has pinyin and every school teaches it. Shanghainese has three competing systems, none of them official, and the single most common complaint from learners is that no two sources spell the same word the same way. Here is how to stop worrying about it.

Updated 20 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.

The short answer

Pick one and stay with it until the sounds are solid. Which one matters much less than not switching. The systems differ in spelling conventions, not in the language — they all describe the same sounds, and once you can hear the sounds, reading a different system takes an afternoon.

If you have no reason to prefer another: the Wu Association system is the one this course uses and the one taught below, because the way it writes voicing and the glottal stop predicts the tone. If you expect to spend time on Wu language sites and forums, learn Wugniu, which is what most of the internet now uses. If you are working from the printed dictionary 上海话大词典, you will need Qian Nairong’s Shanghainese pinyin, which that book is organised by.

The three systems

There have also been romanisations since the nineteenth century — Protestant missionaries wrote Shanghainese in Latin letters, and Joseph Edkins published a grammar of the Shanghai dialect in 1853 — but nothing from that era is in current use. Why no official standard was ever settled is a separate story, told on the writing page.

How far apart are they, really?

Across the 3,000 most frequent characters in this course’s word list, Wu Association and Wugniu spell 32% of them differently. That number sounds alarming and is mostly one habit repeated:

Learn those three correspondences — -h for -q, ny for gn, and a handful of vowel spellings — and you can read either system. That is genuinely the whole of it.

How to read Wu Association romanisation

This is the part nothing else on the web sets out, and three pages on this site depend on it. Nine rules.

1. Letters are not English. Read them as you would in a phonetic alphabet: a as in father, i as in machine, u as in flute, e as in bed.
2. h after a consonant means aspiration. ph, th, kh, tsh, ch are the breathy series — 怕 pho ‘afraid’ is one consonant, not a p followed by an h.
3. h at the end of a syllable is a glottal stop. The syllable stops short, as in the catch in uh-oh: 一 ih ‘one’, 勿 veh ‘not’, 吃 chih ‘to eat’.
4. b d g v z j are the voiced series. These are the consonants Mandarin lost and Wu kept, and they are the hardest thing in the language: 步 bu ‘a step’ is not 布 pu ‘cloth’.
5. c and j are palatal, not English. c is roughly the j of jeep without voice — 举 ciu ‘to raise’ — and j is its voiced partner, 旗 ji ‘a flag’.
6. ny is one sound, the middle of canyon: 人 nyin ‘person’, 泥 nyi ‘mud’.
7. gh is a breathy h, written y before i and u before a u — 鞋 gha ‘shoe’, 移 yi ‘to move’, 胡 wu ‘recklessly’ are all the same initial.
8. Final n nasalises the vowel; it is not a separate consonant. 冷 lan ‘cold’ and 忙 maon ‘busy’ end in the nose, like French blanc, not on the tongue like Mandarin lán.
9. iu is a single front rounded vowel, the German ü: 居 ciu ‘to reside’, 雨 yu ‘rain’.

The complete inventory, sound by sound with a recorded word for each, is on the pronunciation page. Some of those distinctions are ones younger speakers have merged, which is the subject of the old and new Shanghainese page.

The reason this system was chosen here

Because its spelling tells you the tone. Shanghainese tones split into a high and a low register, and the register is decided by the initial consonant: voiced initials take the low register, voiceless ones the high. Wu Association writes that distinction plainly — a syllable beginning b, d, g, v, z or gh, or m, n or l, is low; a syllable ending in -h is short and checked.

Measured against the tone data in Xu and Tang’s 1988 description, the spelling predicts the tone class of about 97% of characters. That is why this course does not mark tone with numbers or diacritics at all, and why you do not have to drill it. The mechanism is on the tones page.

Typing it

None of the three systems is an input method. To type Shanghainese by its own sounds rather than by working out each character’s Mandarin reading first, install the Wugniu schemes for Rime, which is free and runs on every desktop and mobile platform. Note that it is Wugniu, so it expects -q where this course writes -h — which is the one practical reason to know both. The installation, on each platform, is on the typing page.

What not to do

• Do not read a romanisation as English. veh is not veh; the h is a stop.
• Do not mix systems in your own notes. Half in Wugniu and half in Wu Association is how you end up unsure which sound you meant.
• Do not use Mandarin pinyin for Shanghainese. It has no way to write the voiced initials or the glottal stop — the two things that make the language sound like itself — so it will quietly flatten them out.
• Do not wait for a standard. There is no body whose job it is to set one, and none is coming.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Romanization of Wu Chinese
2. Wikipedia: Shanghainese — romanisation, initials and finals (citing Xu Baohua and Tang Zhenzhu 1988, and Qian Nairong 2007)
3. Wiktionary: About Chinese/Wu, on the Wugniu romanisation used there
4. Rime input method: Wugniu schemes
5. wu-chinese.com — the Wu Chinese community site, source of the Wu Association system
6. Edkins, J. (1853). A Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect — cited in Wikipedia: Shanghainese.