Over 80 million people speak Wu languages, but only about half speak Taihu dialects like Shanghainese, spoken in and around Shanghai, China's largest city. Because of both immigration and Chinese policy favoring the national language Putonghua (Standard Chinese), Shanghainese is being lost. Now there are efforts to promote it, but mostly in oral form.

Shanghainese is now written in Chinese characters, but as with Standard Chinese, there is no relationship between the written and spoken forms of words, so they have to be learned separately. If a language has good phonetic orthography - a good alphabet and good spelling, like Musa offers - then the relationship between the spoken and written language is very simple, and learning to read and write is easy. If not - if the alphabet or spelling is bad or, like Chinese, the orthography isn't phonetic - then learning to read and write is much more difficult.

The rest of this page will focus on how to write Shanghainese in Musa. There's no official standard, but there's an informal standard called Middle Period that used in most textbooks, and is what we'll describe here. Older speakers use a more conservative dialect we'll call classic, and younger speakers use a more innovate dialect we'll call fashionable.

Shanghainese words are formed of syllables that each have an initial consonant, a medial semivowel, a vowel, a tone (or no tone), and a final consonant. When there's no initial consonant, in Musa we write a Catch (glottal stop). When there's no final consonant, we write a Break.

In the tables below, the black shows the Wunyu romanization, while the green shows the International Phonetic Alphabet. The characters offer examples.

Initial Consonants

	Labial	Coronal	Hissing	Humming	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	 m [m] 忙	 n [n] 囊		 ny [ȵ] 年	 ng [ŋ] 昂
Voiced Plosive/ Affricate	 b [b] 旁	 d [d] 唐		 j [ʥ] 乾	 g [g] 戆
Unvoiced Plosive/ Affricate	 p [p] 帮	 t [t] 当	 ts [ʦ] 装	 c [ʨ] 见	 k [k] 讲	 ' [ʔ] 蛙
Aspirated Plosive/ Affricate	 ph [pʰ] 胖	 th [tʰ] 汤	 tsh [ʦʰ] 仓	 ch [ʨʰ] 签	 kh [kʰ] 康
Voiced Fricative	 v [v] 房		 z [z] 床	 zh [ʑ] 钱		 gh [ɦ] 华
Unvoiced Fricative	 f [f] 方		 s [s] 爽	 sh [ɕ] 显		 h [h] 花
Lateral		 l [l] 郎

Rimes

The combination of medial semivowel, vowel, and final consonant is called the rime.

Medial	Front		Back		Final
		Central
(vowel)	 i [i] 衣	 iu [y] 女	 y [ɨ] 知	 u [u] 歌	 Open
 开口	 e [e] 来	 oe [ø] 卵	 eu [ɤ] 狗	 o [o] 花
	 ae [ɛ] 兰	 a [a] 太		 au [ɔ] 高
 齐齿	 ie [je] 廿		 ieu [jɤ] 流  ia [ja] 野	 iau [ɥɔ] 要
 撮口		 ioe [ɥø] 圆
 合口	 ue [we] 会  wae [wɛ] 弯	 uoe [wø] 官	 ua [wa] 怪
 开口			 en [əⁿ] 登  an [aⁿ] 冷	 on [oⁿ] 虫  aon [ɑⁿ] 堂	 Nasal
 齐齿	 in [jɪⁿ] 紧		 ian [jaⁿ] 良	 ion [ɥoⁿ] 容  iaon [ɥɑⁿ] 旺
 撮口		 iun [ɥʏⁿ] 云
 合口			 uen [wəⁿ] 困  uan [waⁿ] 横	 uaon [wɑⁿ] 光
 开口	 ih [ɪʔ] 笔¹		 eh [əʔ] 色  ah [ɐʔ] 辣	 oh [oʔ] 北	 Glottal
 齐齿	 ih [jɪʔ] 一¹		 iah [jɐʔ] 药
 撮口		 iuih [ɥʏʔ] 血		 ioh [ɥoʔ] 浴
 合口			 ueh [wəʔ] 骨  uah [wɐʔ] 挖

¹After Labial, Coronal, and Hissing initials,  becomes .

In the table above, I've shown the various elements of the rime in the order in which you would speak them or type them, but when displayed on a page, they combine to form a block in Fangzi gait. We'll talk more about it below.

Syllabic Consonants

In addition to syllables composed with the rimes above, there are four syllabic consonants:

			
r [ɚ] 而	m [m̩] 亩	n [n̩] 鱼	ng [ŋ̩] 鱼

Subtleties

There are two more tricks we spell out.

Most of the time, the glottal final  is pronounced as a clipping of the vowel, like pre-fortis clipping in English. But when a glottal final ends an utterance, it's pronounced as a full glottal stop and written . This change helps indicate the end of an utterance in writing, just like it does in speech.

When a voiced initial (including nasals, laterals, and no initial) begins a word, it's pronounced with murmur, breathy, or slack voice. We write this in Musa by prefixing the word with the  Slackening letter. The prefix helps indicate the beginning of a word in writing, just as the slack voice helps indicate it in speech.

Tones

In Shanghainese, every syllable has one of five tones. But when syllables are combined to form words, the tone pattern is determined by the tone of the first syllable. In a phrase, it's the tone of the last syllable that counts. For example, the word for fried noodles is accented on fried, while the phrase to fry noodles is accented on noodles.

Here are the five base tones, using  as a sample vowel, along with their traditional tone numbers (Shanghainese has lost tones 2-4), tone contours, and an example. The context describes when that tone can occur. Finally, we show the tone pattern for words of various lengths beginning with each tone. The last column shows the neutral tone of all the syllables before the last in a phrase.

Tone			Example	Context	2-syllable words	3-syllable words	4-syllable words	5-syllable words	Phrase
	1	˥˧	他	voiceless initial open/nasal final	 天堂	 天落水	 天下世界		
	5	˧˧˥	带	voiceless initial open/nasal final	 快手	 快手脚	 快手快脚		
	6	˩˩˧	汏	voiced initial open/nasal final	 后头	 后天井	 后门口头		
	7	˥	塔	voiceless initial glottal final	 一级	 一末生	 一天世界	 一本三正经	
	8	˩˨	达	voiced initial glottal final	 煞热	 热天色	  热汤热水	 热侬大头昏	

Fangzi Gait

Writing in characters has lots of disadvantages, but among its advantages over alphabets is how easy it is to recognize the borders between syllables. Musa solves this problem by writing Shanghainese in Fangzi gait, in which the elements of each syllable - initial, medial, vowel, final, and tone - are all written inside a block, like a character except that the elements are phonetic. Here's how it works:

Each Fangzi block fits in a 3×3 square of cells, where each cell holds one shape. The 3 cells in the left column contain the initial consonant, plus a medial (if any), written as a ligature. The vowel, final, and tone each fit in 2 of the remaining 6 cells, but their position depends on the tone:

Not all these patterns are needed in Shanghainese, but most of them are. We still write a Break at the end of Open syllables, we write spaces between words, and use Musa punctuation to separate larger units.

Sample Texts



摇啊摇，摇到外婆桥，外婆叫我好宝宝。三块饼干四块糕，吃仔就要跑。



笃笃笃，卖糖粥，三斤蒲桃四斤壳。吃侬肉，还侬壳。张家老伯伯在拉伐？问侬讨只小花狗。