It's the dialect of Chinese spoken in Shanghai.
The Mandarin that most people are familiar with is the dialect spoken in Beijing and is the standard taught in schools in China. Taiwan also speaks Mandarin but it is different from the Beijing standard probably due to the influence of the Fukian/Hokkien speaking population.
: Hello,
: Can anyone explain to me what Shanghainese is? I haven't seen anything about this, except on the internet.
: :)Go to the following site for an excellent introduction to Shanghainese: http://www.earnshaw.com/shanghainese/shanghainese.cfm
"Luke" wrote:Also, I think...this is just a guess...but every city has their like own little language, like just a few different words...like slang words..
In China, the geographical distances may be great between one area and another. In effect, each major city is kinda like an island, and the language spoken in that area develops over time and becomes distinctly different from that in their neighbouring cities before the advent of tv and radio. Now mass media and education has brought Mandarin in as the national Chinese spoken common language. The localised speech of each city can be called individual dialects if they are different from neighbouring city dialects.
Well, I guess most people on the chineselanguages forum will already know this, but since Luke brought up his guess I feel 'obliged' to give an example:
Ru zoh nong sinni kualoh!
would be
Wo zhu ni xinnian kuaile
in Mandarin. Clearly not just an issue of a few slang words, it's a completely different (though related) language (Wu-language or Wu-dialect).
It looks as though the website is only partially complete, with development ending around late-2005. Nonetheless, it has quite a nice repository of information on the dialect.
Jimmy Hsu wrote:: Hello,
: Can anyone explain to me what Shanghainese is? I haven't seen anything about this, except on the internet.
: :)Go to the following site for an excellent introduction to Shanghainese: http://www.earnshaw.com/shanghainese/shanghainese.cfm