If you head over to the Wikipedia page for Ningbo dialect, you’ll notice the image is the first page of Genesis, written in colloquial Ningbo dialect from a text compiled by missionaries a century ago.
The whole text (4 pages) is available from archive.org. You can find it pretty easily through Google as well. Turns out someone has typed out the first ten verses, diacritics and all, on the Hakka (客家) version of the same wikipedia page. Characters are there as well but for Mandarin, so they don’t match the Wu. Here are the first few verses.
1:1. Kyi-tsu Jing-ming ts‘ông-zao t’in teng di.̤ duâi. 1:2. Di m-neh soh-go siang-mao, tu z hyü k’ong-ko: ‘ong-shü min-teng heh-en: Jing-ming-go Ling yüing-dong læ shü-go min-teng. 1:3. Jing-ming wô, Kæ yiu liang-kwông; liang-kwông ziu yiu de.̤ng duŏh sŏ̤h iông gâu-gâu gì duâi-ĭ. 1:4 Jing-ming k’en keh liang-kwông z hao; Jing-ming ziu feng c’ih liang teng en læ.̤ sĕng gáe̤ cī ciéh nè̤ng gâe̤ng duâi-ĭ táung lâi gó̤, cêu sáung diê-nè̤ng buōng-sê̤ṳ duâi.
Also available on the Hakka Wikipedia is a handful of verses in Suzhou, Shanghai and Taizhou dialects.











