It’s fun to say. Go ahead. Give it a shot.

I’ve spent the last week, probably averaging about 6+ hours a day in between school and my (uncoincidentally) limited social life crunching text, getting paper cuts and carpal tunnel syndrome and ending up with blackened fingertips and blacker keys. And now, thousands of lines of text later, I’d like to officially announce what may be the first Shanghainese phonetic data set of this size fully in IPA.

It’s a collection of widely used characters (7000ish) with their pronunciation as would be heard in the Shanghai dialect of Wu, all done up in the International Phonetic Alphabet, complete with tones.

The reason behind it was primarily that a number of Mandarin dictionaries offer Cantonese pronunciation as an option. I have yet to see one that really covers Wu in any systematic way. The best thing I’ve seen that does handle Wu isn’t a dictionary. Now, because of this data, some are starting to and others will hopefully follow suit.

Before I repeat much more of what can be found on the project page, why not head over and take a look. Further developments will be reflected there.

Thanks to Allan Simon and Christoph Burgmer for their contributions and help.

Tatoeba is a site where phrases are translated by the users into multiple languages. For example:

When will you come home? (English)

你什么时候回家？ (Mandarin)

何時に帰ってくるの。 (Japanese)
なん じ に かえっ て くる の 。

いつ帰宅しますか。 (Japanese)
いつ きたく し ます か 。

Wann kommst du heim? (German)

They have a bunch of languages listed for translation, 31 in total, and for some reason Shanghainese is listed but Cantonese isn’t. Actually I found out about Tatoeba back in January when a commenter here had it linked in his name for the comment. I have only been back recently, but have now registered and will be contributing as much as I can in familiar languages.

Any way head over and take a look. Be sure to contribute some translations for some languages you speak/read/write.

Especially if that happens to be Shanghainese.

Many thanks to the guys at RhinoSpike. I just got an email in response to my feature request. Short and sweet, it reads as follows:

Thank you for your suggestion! We have added Wu as well as renamed Chinese to Mandarin.

And from a “new features” announcement:

New features in RhinoSpike: Accents can now be specified in user profiles and will be displayed next to recordings! Also, audio requests with recordings can no longer be deleted. New languages added: Wu & Tamil. Chinese has been renamed to Mandarin.

Gotta hand it to RhinoSpike and founder Peter Carroll for being so open to feedback and so quick to respond.

Thanks again, guys.

Let me take a moment to mention RhinoSpike, as everyone else seems to be doing the same.

If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a site intended for language learners who want to hear audio of specific sentences and phrases. You can submit sentences to the service, which then posts them on the website. Native speakers of the language in question can then record it and have it posted as a reply. Click here for an example submitted by Global Maverick’s John B. for Cantonese.

I just signed up, and almost as quickly sent them an email. I know, it’s shameless. But to me the thing that would make the service more than just kinda cool would be inclusion of less commonly studied languages. Albanian is up there, which is great since I have so little chance to hear it these days, but of course that’s exactly why it’s not so practical for me. Wu, however, is not.

Check out the site. It you think it looks interesting, then why not sign up? It’s free. And if you sign up, why not shoot them some feedback and ask Wu to be included? The ISO code is “wuu”, which would be worth including in the feedback even if you call the language “Shanghainese”.

And if you do end up leaving feedback, maube leave a comment below. Mostly because I’m curious to see if anyone actually does.