Wu Chinese


Wu is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang province, and parts of Jiangsu province, especially south of the Yangtze River, which make up the Wu cultural region. The Wu languages are at times simply called Shanghainese, especially when introduced to foreigners. The Suzhounese variety was the prestige dialect of Wu as of the 19th century, but had been replaced in status by Shanghainese by the turn of the 20th century, coinciding with a period of rapid language change in the city. The languages of Northern Wu constitute a language family and are mutually intelligible, while those of [|Southern Wu] do not form a phylogenetic language family and are not mutually intelligible.
Historical linguists view Wu of great significance because of its obviously distinct nature. The Wu languages typically preserve all voiced initials of medieval Chinese, as well as the checked tone in the form of a glottal stop. Wu varieties also have noticeably unique morphological and syntactic innovations, as well as lexicon exclusively found in the Wu grouping. It is also of note that the influential linguist Chao Yuen Ren was a native speaker of Changzhounese, a variety of Northern Wu. The Wu varieties, especially that of Suzhou, are traditionally perceived as soft in the ears of speakers of both Wu and non-Wu languages, leading to the idiom "the tender speech of Wu".

Names

Most speakers of Wu varieties do not readily identify with or are entirely unaware of this term for their speech, since the classificatory imposition of "Wu" used in linguistics today is a relatively recent coinage. Saying someone "speaks Wu" is therefore akin to saying someone "speaks a Romance language"; it is not a particularly defined entity like Standard Mandarin or Hochdeutsch.
Most speakers are aware of their local variety's affinities only with other similarly classified varieties. They generally refer only to their local Wu variety, rather than to the dialect family as a whole. This is typically done by affixing 話 to a location's endonym. For example, 溫州話 is used for Wenzhounese. Affixing 閒話 is also common, and more typical of Northern Wu, as in 嘉興閒話 for the. Names for the group as a whole include:
  • Wu language, the formal name and standard reference in dialectology literature.
  • Wu topolect, a common name that refers to Wu languages that appends zh instead of zh, at times perceived as derogatory.
  • Wuyue language, a poetic and historical name, highlighting the roots of the language in antiquity, specifically the culture of the Wu and Yue states during the Warring States period.
  • * Goetian, derived from the Japanese spelling of Wuyue, is among the alternative names listed by Ethnologue. It is also often used by radical separatists such as.
  • Jiang–Zhe speech, a non-standard name meaning 'the speech of Jiangsu and Zhejiang', occasionally used to highlight the fact that the language is spoken across two provinces.
  • Jiangnan speech, a non-standard, less common name linking the language to the cultural region of Jiangnan. This is not to be confused with the Jiangnan Industrial Groups Koiné spoken in Xiangtan, which is classified as a variety of Mandarin. Contrasts with Jiāngběihuà, ie. Huai Chinese.

    History

It is believed that Han Chinese peoples first arrived at the area during pre-dynastic history. After the migrations preceding the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians, the vernacular that would later lead to modern Wu Chinese started taking shape, though the court language of Jiankang was still noticeably different to that of the commonfolk. A second migration wave during the Southern Song dynasty, this time to Lin'an, led to the formation of the modern literary layer, and during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, many operatic traditions and vernacular texts began to appear. Later, during the Qing dynasty, missionaries began translating the Bible into various local varieties, recording the exact pronunciations of many varieties for the first time. This was also when the economic boom of Shanghai happened, leading to its urban variety becoming the prestige variety over that of Suzhou. The 20th century marked a pivotal moment of Wu linguistic change, as Standard Mandarin was promoted nation-wide, though the 21st century is seeing revival efforts for many Wu Chinese varieties.

Ancient and early dynastic Wu

Before the migration of the Han Chinese peoples, the Jiangnan region was inhabited by Kra-Dai or Austroasiatic peoples, which were dubbed barbarians by the early Chinese.
According to traditional history, Taibo of Wu settled in the area during the Shang dynasty, bringing along a large section of the population and Chinese administrative practices to form the state of Wu. The majority population of the state would have been the ancient Baiyue peoples, who had very different customs and practices compared to the Chinese.
It is said in Master Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals that the customs and languages of the states of Wu and Yue were the same. This refers not just to the Baiyue language of the area, but also of that of "Ancient Wu", a Sinitic language that was likely used only by nobility. The northern border of this Ancient Wu language is at the Huai River rather than the Yangtze like it is today, and its southern limits may have reached as far as Fujian, as Proto-Min may have been a daughter language to Ancient Wu, though this is not fully accepted. As early as the time of Guo Pu, speakers easily perceived differences between dialects in different parts of China, including the area where Ancient Wu was spoken. The language slowly receded from the north due to growing pressure from the Central Plains, until its northern limit was set near the Yangtze River towards the end of the Western Jin dynasty. However, all modern Wu varieties work within the Qieyun system and so Old Chinese dialect cannot be the primary origin of Wu Chinese today.

Non-Sinitic strata

It is known that Wu languages inherited a significant number of loanwords of Kra-Dai origin. A study of the variety spoken in Maqiao, a suburb of Shanghai, found that 126 out of around a thousand lexical items surveyed were of Kra-Dai origin. Terms such as 落蘇 are also shared between other Sinitic languages as well as Kra-Dai languages. Shared terms with Austroasiatic languages have also been suggested, though many of them, such as Vietnamese đầm, bèo, and kè, have also been argued to be areal features, Chinese words in disguise, or long shots.
Though Sino-Tibetan, Kra-Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic are mostly considered to be unrelated to one another, Laurent Sagart has proposed some possible phylogenetic affinities. Specifically, Tai–Kadai and Sino-Tibetan could possibly both belong to the Sino-Austronesian language family because of a scattering of cognates between their ancestral forms, and there is also some, albeit much more tenuous, evidence to suggest that Austroasiatic should also be included. However, his views are but one among competing hypotheses about the phylogeny of these languages, and is not widely accepted. See the Sino-Austronesian languages article for some further detail.
It does appear that Wu varieties have had non-Sinitic influences, and many contain words cognate with those of other languages in various strata. These words however are few and far between, and Wu on the whole is most strongly influenced by other Chinese languages rather than any other linguistic influence.

Medieval Wu

This period is bookended by two major migration waves into the Wu-speaking area. The first was in the 4th century CE from primarily the mountains of Shandong, whereas the second happened during the 12th century CE, and originated from the Heluo region.

Early Medieval

Events such as the Wu Hu uprising and the Disaster of Yongjia during the Western Jin dynasty, collectively known as the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians, caused the imperial court to move from the Heluo region, along with a large migration wave from the north that lasted 150 years, primarily northern Jiangsu and much of Shandong, entered the Jiangnan region, establishing a new capital at Jiankang, modern-day Nanjing.
Migrants went as far south as central Zhejiang, though many settled in the geographically less challenging areas in the north, that is to say, the Yangtze Delta and the Hangjiahu Plain. Early stages of this period of change was likely marked by diglossia, with the commonfolk typically speaking Ancient Wu or their native Shandong or northern Jiangsu Chinese, and the nobility, both new migrants and old aristocracy, typically speaking a variety not dissimilar to that of early medieval Luoyang. This linguistic situation eventually led to the formation of modern Wu, with many early coincidental strata that are hard to differentiate today. It is unclear as to when exactly the language of the Baiyue became extinct, though during the Eastern Han dynasty, Kra-Dai words were recorded in the everyday vernacular of people in the region, and by the end of the Western Jin, the common language of the region was Sinitic, as will be explained below.
As early as the Eastern Wu dynasty, commentators criticized the speech of the Southern aristocracy, noting that it is neither Wu-sounding nor Northern. However, evidence suggests that the primary language among the populace was, in fact, Sinitic, although not one that was perceived as "civilized". This possible civilian language would be a common Jiangdong Sinitic language, as is seen in the Book of Wei, which unflatteringly compares the speech of Jiangdong to the calls of wild animals. The court language of Jiankang at this time would not have been the same as the civilian Wu language, though it would have been closely related. This would also mark the time where Japanese Go-on readings were loaned, and it is accepted that these readings would have been loaned from the language variety of medieval Jiankang.