Shanghainese vs Wenzhounese: two Wu languages

Wenzhounese has a reputation: the hardest Chinese to understand, the language the army supposedly used as a code. It is also, on paper, a relative of Shanghainese — and the two cannot hold a conversation.

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.

Same family, different branch

Shanghainese and Wenzhounese are both Wu. That is where the similarity ends, because Wu splits into a northern and a southern half and they sit on opposite sides of it.

The consequence is in Wikipedia’s description of the family in one sentence: “Northern Wu and Southern Wu are not mutually intelligible.” Northern Wu varieties are “mostly mutually intelligible with one another”, which is why Shanghai, Suzhou and Ningbo can broadly manage — that is the subject of the page on Shanghainese and its northern neighbours. Southern Wu is a different matter. It is described as “one of the most internally-diverse among the Sinitic groups, with very little mutual intelligibility between varieties” — meaning southern Wu varieties often cannot understand each other, never mind Shanghai.

The hardest Chinese to understand

This part of the reputation is real, or at least it is what the sources say. Wikipedia describes Wenzhounese as “the least comprehensible dialect for an average Mandarin speaker”, and cites Chinese news coverage of a ranking that put it first among the ten hardest varieties to understand.

There is a saying that goes with it, and it is the kind of thing a language earns: fear not the Heavens, fear not the Earth, but fear the Wenzhou man speaking Wenzhounese.

Worth being precise about what that means, though. The sources behind the ranking are journalism and popular polling rather than linguistics. The measurable version of the claim comes from elsewhere: the Leiden intelligibility experiments, which tested Chinese varieties functionally by having speakers translate what they heard. Played Wenzhou speech, Beijing listeners correctly translated two per cent of the target words in a sentence — the lowest figure in the study. That is evidence; the newspaper ranking is a headline that happens to agree with it, and the rest of those numbers are on the intelligibility page.

The code-talker story, and what is actually behind it

You will read that Wenzhounese was used as a battlefield code by Chinese forces against Japan, and again in the 1979 war with Vietnam — a Chinese Navajo. It is a great story and it is on Wikipedia.

It is also thinly sourced, and the page itself signals as much. The claim is introduced with the word “reputed”, and the citation behind it is a single Chinese pop-history web article of the listicle variety, not a military history and not a linguistic source. No second reference supports it.

So the honest statement is this: Wenzhounese is widely said to have been used this way, the claim is repeated everywhere in English, and I could not find it traced to a primary source. It may well be true. It is not established. This page would rather tell you that than repeat a good story as a fact — the same policy it applies to the loanword etymologies on the loanwords page.

Why Wenzhou is everywhere in Europe

Wenzhounese turns up abroad far out of proportion to the size of the city, and that is the real reason a European reader may have met it before hearing of Shanghainese. Wenzhou has one of the most concentrated emigration patterns in China:

• Italy has the largest community, counted at over 288,000 Wenzhou people, dominating the Chinese population of several cities — in Turin, around 70 per cent of Chinese residents work in restaurants.
• Spain: roughly 70 per cent of Chinese people in the country are reported to be from Wenzhou or nearby Qingtian.
• France: somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000.

Behind it sits the “Wenzhou model” — the city’s early and unusually dense private enterprise, counted in the hundreds of thousands of individually owned commercial units, which became a byword in China for bottom-up capitalism. Shanghai’s story is the opposite shape: people came in, and the language absorbed them, which is how 阿拉 a la ‘we, us’ arrived from Ningbo.

Does learning one help with the other?

No, and you should not plan around it. They share an ancestor and a classification and not much that a learner can use. A Shanghainese speaker gets no meaningful head start on Wenzhounese, and the reverse is equally true — which follows directly from the sourced fact that the two halves of Wu are not mutually intelligible.

If what you want is a language that transfers, the answer is the northern Wu neighbours rather than the southern ones. Suzhou and Ningbo are genuinely close to Shanghai; Wenzhou is a different language with a shared surname.

So which should you learn?

For almost everyone, Shanghainese — not because it is better but because it is possible. There are dictionaries, a romanisation, an input method, television, films and a body of recorded material, all of which are on the resources page. Wenzhounese has far less of all of it, in any language.

The exception is the obvious one: if your family is from Wenzhou, learn Wenzhounese, and do not let anyone tell you that Shanghainese is a substitute. It is not. The two are as far apart as the numbers on this page suggest, and the Wu Chinese page sets out the whole family so you can see where yours sits in it.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Wenzhounese — the Oujiang classification, speaker numbers, tones, “the least comprehensible dialect for an average Mandarin speaker”, the folk saying, and the “reputed” wartime-code claim with its single citation
2. Wikipedia: Wu Chinese — Northern Wu about 47 million and mostly mutually intelligible; Southern Wu internally diverse; “Northern Wu and Southern Wu are not mutually intelligible”
3. Wikipedia: Wenzhou people — the communities in Italy, Spain and France, and the Wenzhou economic model
4. Tang, Chaoju and van Heuven, Vincent J. Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects tested functionally (Leiden repository)
5. Wikipedia: Shanghainese