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.

A quick shot from the subway this past fall. The red bag says “上海人” and “上海宁”, the 宁 in the latter being the typical way to transcribe /ɲiɲ/, Shanghainese for 人, with characters.

One of those minor instances of the language popping up in print around the city.

A lifestyle site for Shanghai, ShanghaiNing.com offers a good sampling of written Shanghainese. It’s a long-running site, up since at least 2002. The target audience is fairly focused and you’ll find no shortage of pics from the club and clips of topolect rap. But even if that’s not your cup of Jaegermeister, it’s still worth a look if you’re into how the general public writes Wu in Shanghai.

The tagline for the site is 侬白相啥?, which in Mandarin would be 你玩耍什么?. I’m up for a more fluid English translation than “What are you playing?” or “How are you playing around?” if anyone has any suggestions. And in case you missed it in earlier posts, this “ning” is the Wu pronunciation of 人, [ɲiɲ].

For another bit of the web embracing Wu, look to the name of one of the still-standing microblogging platforms operating in China, 做啥.