Someone on Youku has uploaded a series of videos on how to speak Shanghaihua. They videos are old news, having been up for at least a couple years, or if not these videos specifically than videos just like them. I was floating around the site yesterday and decided to watch a couple. I couldn’t help but notice some of the comments, things like
”有点象 宁波话”
and
”她的发音不标准”.
What’s the deal here? That’s a rhetorical question as I’ve lived here long enough to know exactly what they perceive the deal to be. I just don’t buy that it’s real.
Magnus of mandmx.com mentioned this in an interview we did here a while back. To quote:
Back to Youku. The videos are called 学说上海话. It stands to reason that anyone having grown up speaking 吴语 somewhere within the municipality could rightly be called a speaker of Shanghainese. What’s the difference if they’re from Baoshan or Jiabei or Minhang? Well, maybe not Minhang. The part that gets me is when people say things like “This isn’t standard pronunciation” in the comments.
Since when has Shanghainese been standardised?
As someone trying to learn Shanghainese, are you better off learning a ‘nonstandard’ “sounds like Ningbohua” pronunciation, or walking around saying it with a thick Texas drawl? Damned if you do etc.
Are there any particular pronunciation differences worth noting? I’m curious.
Nothing I can detect. Probably some subtle vowel stuff.
Speaking of nonstandard pronunciation, I met a girl from 海南三亚 tonight and she had an interesting accent.
Rather than the typical 南方 tendency to turn ’sh’, ‘zh’, and ‘ch’ into ’s’, ‘z’ and ‘c’， she made the reverse switch. So 一次 came out sounding like ‘yi che’ and 十四 was ’shi shi’, etc.
I even asked her about it and she said it was because of the 方言 not because of any general pronunciation issues she may have had herself.
Interesting!
Good stuff. I’ve never heard that as a system-wide thing, only 粽子 type stuff.
I know a professor who says xuǎnzhé instead of xuǎnzé but I haven’t talked to him long enough to see if there are other words he does this with.
A few of my professors talked about Shanghainese dialects in my grad school classes. According to them, Shanghainese is split both along regional lines as well as on generational lines. And obviously, there’s no standard, because it’s all non-standard.
Shortly after I bought a Shanghainese dictionary with IPA I ask’d my 崇明人 cabbie to say the word. It didn’t match at all.
I had the same issue in Changzhou. I’d learn the hell out of some word or phrase only to be told by someone in another district that I sounded like a “xiã wu ɲiɲ” country hick.
“And obviously, there’s no standard, because it’s all non-standard. ”
My point exactly.