Wu Chinese Characters

Wu (吴语, Wúyǔ) is the Chinese language group of Shanghai and the lower Yangtze delta, and its best-known variety is Shanghainese (上海话). Like Cantonese, Hakka, Gan and Xiang, it has no letters of its own: it is written in Chinese characters, the same ones Mandarin uses. Shanghainese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible when spoken, but a newspaper in Shanghai is printed in the same Standard Written Chinese, in simplified characters, as one in Beijing.

Wu as people actually speak it shows up in writing in chat messages, dialect subtitles, comedy, song lyrics, shop signs that play on local words, and a long line of books: the Ming writer Feng Menglong collected Suzhou folk songs, and late Qing novels such as The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (海上花列传) wrote all their dialogue in Suzhou speech. That tradition is where characters like 侬, 覅 and 搿 come from.

Speakers name the language after the city: 上海话 or, in Shanghainese itself, 上海闲话 (Shanghai speech), 苏州话 for Suzhou, 宁波话 for Ningbo. 吴语 is the linguists' name for the whole group, and its ISO language code is wuu.

吴: what Wu means in Chinese

吴 (Wú) was the name of the ancient state of Wu, which had its capital at today's Suzhou in the Spring and Autumn period, and later of Sun Quan's Eastern Wu in the Three Kingdoms era. The name stuck to the whole region south of the lower Yangtze, and so to its speech. Taiwan and Hong Kong write the character 吳, mainland China 吴, and Japan 呉. 吴 is also one of the most common Chinese surnames, which is why so many people search for the "Wu Chinese character" as a name.

Plenty of other words are spelled wu in pinyin, so the search often means something else: 五 (wǔ) is five, 无 (wú, traditional 無) means none, as in 无为 wu wei, effortless action, 午 (wǔ) is noon and the hour of the Horse, 武 (wǔ) martial, as in 武术 wushu, 舞 (wǔ) dance, and 悟 (wù) to awaken, as in the Monkey King's name 孙悟空 Sun Wukong. Only 吴 refers to the language and the region.

Shanghainese words in writing: 侬, 阿拉, 覅

Shanghainese says many everyday words differently from Mandarin, and writers often write them with Chinese characters, though spellings can vary. 侬 (roughly nong, traditional 儂) is you, so hello is 侬好 and thank you is 谢谢侬. In old Wu folk songs 侬 meant I or a person, which survives in the phrase 吴侬软语, the soft speech of the Wu people. 阿拉 is we, a word usually said to have come into Shanghainese from Ningbo; 伊 is he or she and 伊拉 they. In Suzhou you is 倷.

Some characters were made by squeezing two into one, the way Wu speakers squeeze the words. 覅 is 勿 (not) written over 要 (want) and means don't, as in 覅客气, don't mention it; 朆 is 勿 plus 曾 and means not yet. The preface of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai explains that 覅 is to be read as one syllable, because Suzhou people run 勿要 together.

Other words borrow a character for its sound or an old meaning: 啥 what, 勿 not, 呒没 there is none, 伐 at the end of a question (侬晓得伐? do you know?), 搿 this, 侪 all, 拨 give, 汏 wash, 囡 girl (小囡 a child), 嗲 sweet or simply great, 戆大 a fool. Two-character words that Mandarin has in another form are common too: 辰光 time, 晓得 to know, 欢喜 to like, 今朝 today, 交关 very, 白相 to play, and 弄堂, the lanes of old Shanghai housing.

How to type Wu Chinese characters

On a phone or computer, add a Chinese (Simplified) pinyin keyboard and type the Mandarin reading: wuyu gives 吴语, shanghaihua gives 上海话, nong gives 侬, ala gives 阿拉 and sha gives 啥. Rarer Wu characters are in the keyboard's list under their dictionary readings, for example 搿 under ge and 汏 under da, though often far down. 覅 has the unusual dictionary reading fiào; if your keyboard does not offer it, use handwriting input or copy it from this page.

In Microsoft Word on Windows, type a character's code point and press Alt+X: 5434 becomes 吴, 4fac becomes 侬, 8985 becomes 覅. On a Mac, switch to the Unicode Hex Input source and hold Option while typing 4FAC. In HTML write 侬 for 侬. The punctuation comes from the Chinese keyboard itself: with it switched on, the full stop key gives 。, the comma ，, the backslash 、, and Shift with the < and > keys gives 《 and 》 for book and film titles.

Where Wu Chinese is spoken

CLDR estimates about 85 million speakers of Wu, all in China 🇨🇳, which makes it one of the largest Chinese language groups, often ranked second after Mandarin. Its area is Shanghai, southern Jiangsu around Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou, most of Zhejiang including Hangzhou, Ningbo, Shaoxing and Wenzhou, and small neighbouring parts of Anhui, Jiangxi and Fujian.

Wu is known for keeping the voiced b, d, g sounds of Middle Chinese, which Mandarin and Cantonese lost, and for tones that spread over a whole word: urban Shanghainese is usually described with five tones. The varieties differ a great deal; Wenzhou speech is famous for being hard to follow even for other Wu speakers. Neighbouring groups have collections of their own: Chinese (Mandarin in simplified characters), Traditional Chinese, Gan Chinese, Xiang Chinese, Hakka Chinese, Cantonese, Min Nan Chinese and Japanese, and the country page China gathers the flag, festivals and food emoji.