Wu

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Wu (linguistics) Summary

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An estimated 85 million people, living predominantly in the provincial-level municipality of Shanghai as well as in the Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces in China, speak the various dialects of Wu. The Wu speakers in Jiangsu Province live primarily south of the Chang (Yangtze) River. A few enclaves of Wu speakers are located at the north of the mouth of this river.

The Wu region is different in a variety of ways from the other regions in which the major Sinitic sublanguages hold sway. In the Wu region, there are several culture centers, whereas in the other sublanguage groups, there is one major "local" capital. This is a population center that sets the cultural as well as linguistic pattern for the rest of the group. For example, the Yue have Guangzhou, while the Minnan of Fujian Province have Xiamen. The scattered Hakka also look to Meixian as their geographic, cultural, and linguistic center.

In comparison, the Wu people are far more diverse. Shanghai, the sublanguage's largest population center, does not really play the role of the center for the Wu people, because it is a new city, relatively speaking, and is subject to Western influences. Furthermore, the population in Shanghai has come from various Wuspeaking districts as well as from Nanjing and beyond. Centers such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shaoxing have all played major roles in the history of the Wu, but none can truly be said to be its center.

The Wu people are also different from other Chinese in that they would not usually describe their subethnic identities in terms of their province of origin. This is because only the southern third of Jiangsu Province is Wu speaking. There is great diversity in Zhejiang Province itself and the people are not all Wu speakers. So the Wu people of Zhejiang have tended to identify themselves by their native prefectures, which are subprovincial political units. Unlike the Yue, Hakka, and Min people to the south, the Wu people did not join the modern migration of Chinese abroad on any major scale, and Wu speakers have only a minor representation in the overseas Chinese population.

The Wu language had its origin in Suzhou—one of the cultural centers of the imperial period. The sociolinguistic evolution of the Wu region, however, is not well established. From the center of its origins, the language spread to regions south of the lower Chang River. It is a language that has gained importance because of the rise of Shanghai as a metropolitan center and one of the treaty ports that was ceded to the Western powers—Britain, France, and Germany.

Origins of Wu

The Chinese character for wu was possibly first applied to people living around the mouth of the Chang River who spoke a non-Sinitic language that was largely incomprehensible to those speaking the various Sinitic sublanguages. The other meaning given to the word wu, and rarely so, is "clamorous" or "yelling." This might be a reference to the rather loud and emphatic nature of the Wu people's way of speaking. To many early Han Chinese, the language might have also sounded strident. The mention of the kingdom of Wu first appeared in Chinese annals around the seventh century BCE. Historical linguists have been uncertain how to classify the ancient Wu dialect, which could not yet be considered a Sinitic sublanguage at that time. There is a widespread assumption that the language is related to the Tai languages. But the probability is that it is more of a Sino-Tibetan language. The kingdom of Wu started to adopt aspects of the evolving Chinese culture during the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 BCE). Subsequent warfare led to the complete incorporation of the kingdom into the Sinitic political world.

Sinitic Wu culture is thought to have reached its highest point during the Southern Song period (1126– 1279). This would have been the period when the Wu region was at the geographical core of what has been considered to be the most highly cultured state in China, if not in the world. The Wu-speaking people left a major legacy for human civilization. The Southern Song, with its capital at present-day Hangzhou, played an important role in transmitting Buddhism and other cultural and artistic values to neighboring countries such as Japan.

Distinguishing Features of the Wu Sublanguage

Many of the archaic features to be found in the Wu sublanguage help distinguish it sharply from modern Mandarin. Principal among these is the continuing use in the sublanguage of the series of voiced initial consonants that have been lost in other Sinitic sublanguages. Most forms of Wu will have b, d, dzh, g, p, and z as initials. Another feature is a special voiced h (a bit like the guttural German r), which is contrasted in Wu with the normal, or unvoiced, h, according to Leo Moser.

There are fewer diphthongs in Wu than in most other Sinitic sublanguages, and the phonetics are deemed to be somewhat closer to the Old Xiang, or Laoxianghua, of Hunan. Wu is different from other sublanguages like the Yue, Minnan, Gan, and Hakka, particularly in the simplified endings of its syllables. While Mandarin has also simplified its endings, it has done this differently from those of Wu, with varying results. Hence, the ancient final syllables such as, p, t, and k appear in neither Mandarin nor Wu.

Final consonants of Wu dialects typically include only one or two nasal endings with perhaps the glottal stop. It is a pattern that more closely resembles the dialects of Minbei and some forms of Eastern Mandarin. The Wu vernaculars are characterized by complex patterns of tone sandhi in which the tone of one syllable is modified in speaking by that of the syllable that falls next to it. ("Sandhi" is a linguistic term meaning the modification of the sound of a morpheme in certain phonetic situations or contexts.) While tone sandhi in the Min-speaking areas has been deemed to be complex, it is even more so among the Wu dialects.

Wu also differs from other Sinitic sublanguages in grammatical and structural ways. In particular, the Wu dialects differ from Mandarin by putting the direct object before the indirect object when both appear in a sentence. That characteristic makes Wu similar to Cantonese, but different from the intervening Min vernacular tongues, which tend to have an ordering that resembles more that of Mandarin.

The Wu dialect tends to vary by stages over the larger region mainly as a consequence of the pluralism of standards in the sublanguage. The isoglosses (geographical boundaries that delimit the area within which a linguistic feature is found) overlap in what has been found to be a complex pattern. In spite of such variations within the region of Wu-speaking peoples, however, there is generally intercomprehensibility among the so-called Shanghai dialects, of which Suzhou Wu is one example.

One exception to the intercomprehensibility of the Wu dialects is the dialect spoken in the port city of Wenzhou, located in the south of Zhejiang. This Wenzhou dialect and some of the dialects spoken by people living inland from the port are considered extremely different from other Wu dialects. This has led some linguists to suggest that the Wenzhou dialect should be treated and recognized as a Sinitic language that is separate from the rest of Wu.

The vernacular of Shanghai represents a fusion of various forms of Northern Wu and other dialectical influences, including even Eastern Mandarin. Other Wu speakers have traditionally treated the Shanghai vernacular somewhat contemptuously as a mixture of Suzhou and Ningbo dialects. Shanghainese have been portrayed as strategic, smart thinkers, interested in new ideas, and in new words to add to their language. Yet the Shanghainese people have long resisted the Communist government's efforts to make them speak the universally accepted Mandarin dialect.