Which Shanghainese words survive, and which faded

The Shanghainese people speak today still runs on its own everyday words. In recorded conversation, speakers say 侬 non ‘you’, 物事 meh zy ‘thing’ and 晓得 shiau teh ‘to know’, and almost never the Mandarin words for them. What has changed is inside the language: the sentence-ending 哉 tse and the old word for we have gone, and a handful of Mandarin forms have come in. This page counts both, from textbooks printed in 1868 and 1907 and from conversations recorded in this century.

Updated 16 October 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.

How the comparison was made

Verbavia’s Shanghainese frequency list was built by counting words in three kinds of text, and two of them are a century and a half apart. The old text is two missionary textbooks of the Shanghai dialect, Joseph Edkins’s grammar in its 1868 edition and F. L. Hawks Pott’s lessons of 1907: 34,534 words between them. The new text is 4.2 hours of conversation between twenty Shanghainese speakers, transcribed by hand: 52,412 words. The same word list and the same counting rules were applied to both.

A word that is common in both has survived. A word that fills the old books and never comes up in the recordings has faded, or at least retreated. Because the two texts are different sizes, the tables give counts for every 10,000 words where sizes are being compared.

The words that survive

The core of everyday Shanghainese is the same now as in 1868. These are the words that make a sentence Shanghainese and not Mandarin, each with how often it was used per 10,000 words then and now, and how many times the Mandarin word for the same thing appears in the modern recordings.

Every one of these was in the old textbooks and every one is in the recordings. Most are used more often now than in the textbooks, which says more about textbooks than about speech: conversation is full of you, what and that thing. The last column is the one that matters. Across thirteen of the commonest meanings in the language, the Mandarin word was written down a handful of times in more than fifty thousand words. Among people who still speak Shanghainese, the basic vocabulary has not been replaced.

Fifty everyday words like these, set beside their Mandarin counterparts with recordings, are on 50 words that differ in Shanghainese and Mandarin.

The words that faded

Three changes show clearly, and each is a swap: one word going out as another comes in. The figures here are plain counts.

• We. The textbooks say 我伲. The recordings say 阿拉 a la, 507 times, and never 我伲. Reference descriptions agree: older Shanghainese had 我伲, younger speakers use 阿拉, and 阿拉 came from the speech of Ningbo.
• The particle that ends a sentence. 哉 tse closes a sentence to say that something is now the case, and the textbooks use it 123 times. In the recordings it does not appear; its job is done by 了, 972 times. Written Shanghainese still uses 哉, so a learner needs to recognise both.
• The most. 顶 tin was the usual word in the textbooks and 最 tsoe the rarer one. Today it is the other way round.

Three more words are frequent in the textbooks and absent from the recordings altogether:

The everyday word for what has not happened is now 没 meh, which appears 271 times in the recordings, in that use and as not to have. The three older words are still found in written Wu, and the course includes them for reading.

Where Mandarin has come in

Mandarin has not taken the core, but it is present at the edges. In each of these pairs the first word is the Shanghainese one and the second is the form shared with Mandarin, with how many times each was said in the recordings.

The first three rows are where the shared form has won or drawn level. For how much, the recordings have 多少 tu sau 53 times and the older 几化 ci ho not once. For but, the Mandarin-style word is ahead of 勿过 veh ku, on very small numbers. In the other rows the Shanghainese word is overwhelmingly the usual one, and the Mandarin form appears a few times: enough to show that speakers switch, not enough to call a replacement.

Word order is shifting in the same direction. Reference descriptions note that older speakers tend to put an adverb after the verb and younger speakers put it before, as Mandarin does.

What the counts cannot show

• Who was not recorded. The recordings are of people who speak Shanghainese well enough to be recorded speaking it. The larger change is among people who do not use it at all, and that is a question for surveys, which are on the is Shanghainese dying page.
• Sound. A word can survive and still be said differently. The loss of tones and endings within living memory is on the old and new Shanghainese page.
• Rare words. A word that is missing from four hours of talk about food and money may simply not have come up. Nothing here is a claim about a word that is not a grammar word or a very common one.
• Spelling. The old books and the modern transcripts write the same word in different characters. Those differences were mapped onto one spelling before counting; words where the mapping is uncertain are left out of this page.

What a learner should take from this

• Learn the Shanghainese core first. It is what speakers actually use, and it is what makes speech sound local.
• Recognise the older forms. 哉 tse, 勿曾 veh zen and 几时 ci zy are in songs, older recordings and written Wu.
• Do not be thrown by a Mandarin word in a Shanghainese sentence. Speakers mix. It does not mean you misheard.

The free Shanghainese course teaches the core in sentences, and the most common Shanghainese words page shows the frequency list itself. The foreign words Shanghainese took in a century ago, and which of those lasted, are on the loanwords page.

Sources

1. Verbavia (2026). Shanghainese Word Frequency, v1: counts in MagicData’s recorded conversations, in written Wu, and in Pott (1907) and Edkins (1868). CC0.
2. MagicData: Shanghai Dialect Conversational Speech Corpus (4.19 hours, 20 speakers).
3. Pott, F. L. Hawks (1907). Lessons in the Shanghai Dialect. Project Gutenberg.
4. Edkins, J. (1868). A Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect, 2nd edition. Project Gutenberg.
5. Wikipedia: Shanghainese — 我伲 in older varieties and 阿拉, from Ningbonese, among younger speakers; adverb placement in older and younger speakers.