What language is spoken in Shanghai?

Two languages, and they are not the same one with different accents. Mandarin is the language of school, work, signs and strangers. Shanghainese is the city’s own language, spoken at home and among people who grew up there.

Updated 2 October 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

Mandarin — Putonghua, China’s national standard — is the official language of Shanghai and the one you will hear in most of public life: in schools, offices, shops, on the metro and on television. Almost everyone in the city speaks it, and it is the language a visitor will be answered in.

Shanghainese — 上海闲话, 上海闲话 zaon he ghae gho ‘Shanghainese’ in its own pronunciation — is the local language: a variety of Wu Chinese, the branch of Chinese spoken across the Yangtze delta. It is what many Shanghai families speak at home, and what older people in the city speak to each other. It is a different spoken language from Mandarin, though both are written with the same characters.

Shanghai is also a city of migrants, so you will hear plenty of other Chinese varieties on any street, but the two languages of Shanghai are these.

Mandarin: the language of school, work and strangers

Mandarin’s position is set by law. The national language law, in force since 2001, makes Putonghua the basic language of school teaching and of broadcasting, and Shanghai’s own regulations, in force since 2006, name it the basic language not only of teaching but of school group activities, and let radio and television presenters use dialect only with official approval. Every child in Shanghai is schooled in Mandarin.

The city’s make-up makes it necessary as well as official. Shanghai had 24.87 million residents at the 2020 census, and 42% of them — about 10.5 million people — were residents from other provinces. A city where four people in ten come from somewhere else needs a common language, and across China that language is now near-universal: the Ministry of Education reported that 80.72% of the country’s population spoke Putonghua in 2020.

Written Shanghai is Mandarin too. Street signs, menus, newspapers and forms are in standard written Chinese, which is Mandarin in characters; Shanghainese has no standard written form of its own, for reasons set out on the writing page.

Shanghainese: the city’s own language

Nobody has counted Shanghainese speakers exactly. The figure usually quoted, 15.86 million from 2012, estimates the population of the area where it is spoken, suburbs included, rather than surveying who speaks it. Wu Chinese as a whole — the family it belongs to, covered on the Wu Chinese page — had about 81 million first-language speakers in a 2019 estimate.

The surveys that have looked at Shanghai itself agree on the direction:

• A 2013 telephone survey of 1,008 residents aged 13 and over, by the Shanghai Statistics Bureau, found that 81.4% could speak Shanghainese at least somewhat, and that Shanghai-born 13-to-20-year-olds rated their own listening and speaking lower than any other age group did.
• Street surveys in 2016 and 2017 found that 96% of Shanghai-born adults spoke it fluently, but only 70% of those under 25 — and only about 60% of the under-25s spoke it at home.
• A survey of 1,383 students from 14 schools, reported in 2014, found that more of them named Putonghua as their first language, 46.3%, than Shanghainese, 35.2%.

So the honest picture is generational. Almost every older Shanghainese person speaks it well; most young people born in Shanghai still understand it; many of them no longer use it at home. The full story, and what is being done about it, is on is Shanghainese dying?

How different are they?

Different enough that a Mandarin speaker who has never learned Shanghainese cannot follow it. The best measurement is a 2009 Leiden study by Tang Chaoju and Vincent van Heuven, which played speakers of one variety to listeners of another. Shanghai itself was not in the sample, but Suzhou, its northern Wu neighbour, was: Beijing listeners correctly translated only 18% of the target words in Suzhou sentences, while Suzhou listeners — who had learned Mandarin at school — got 87% of Beijing’s. The details are on can Mandarin speakers understand Shanghainese?

The differences sit exactly where you meet them first, in the commonest words:

The sounds differ too. Shanghainese keeps voiced consonants Mandarin lost centuries ago and syllables that end in a glottal catch, and its tones work differently: five on a syllable said alone, but in a word of two or more syllables the first one sets the melody of the whole. Everything that separates the two is set out on Shanghainese vs Mandarin.

Where you will hear each

• Mandarin: in schools and offices, in most shops and restaurants in the centre, on almost all television and radio, in announcements, and with anyone who can tell you are not from Shanghai.
• Shanghainese: between older residents, in families, in neighbourhood conversation, and in a few deliberate public places — Shanghai buses began adding stop announcements in Shanghainese from 2013, and metro Lines 16 and 17 announce stations in it alongside Mandarin and English.
• On screen: the local news programme 新闻坊 has a weekly segment in Shanghainese, and Wong Kar-wai’s 2023 series Blossoms Shanghai was made in a Shanghainese version as well as a Mandarin one.

What this means if you are visiting

Mandarin will get you everywhere, and English will get you some of the way in hotels and the business districts. Shanghainese will not be expected of you — but because so few outsiders learn any, a few words of it are one of the nicest surprises you can give someone there. Start with hello, thank you and goodbye, and the phrases for visitors after that.

Sources

1. Law of the People’s Republic of China on the National Common Language and Script, revised 2025
2. Shanghai Municipal Measures for Implementing the National Common Language and Script Law (2005)
3. Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau: Seventh National Population Census bulletin (2021)
4. Ministry of Education / Xinhua (2 June 2021) — 80.72% of China’s population spoke Putonghua in 2020
5. Wikidata: Wu Chinese, number of speakers (Ethnologue, 2019)
6. Wikipedia: Shanghainese, number of speakers (Li 2012)
7. Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau: survey of language use (2014)
8. The Paper: Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law street surveys (24 January 2018)
9. Wenhui Bao via China Education Online: survey of students (March 2014)
10. Tang, Chaoju and van Heuven, Vincent J. (2009). Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested. Lingua 119, 709–732
11. Wikipedia (Chinese): 上海话, bus stop announcements
12. Wikipedia (Chinese): Shanghai Metro Line 16
13. Wikipedia (Chinese): 保卫上海话, the 新闻坊 segment