Wu :

Wú (simplified Chinese: 吴语; traditional Chinese: 吳語; pinyin: Wú yǔ; Wade–Giles: Ng gniu (colloquial) or Wu gniu (literary) is one of the major divisions of the Chinese language. It is spoken in most of Zhejiang province, the municipality of Shanghai, southern Jiangsu province, as well as smaller parts of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian provinces.

Major Wu dialects include those of Shanghai, Suzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Yongkang, and Quzhou. The traditional prestige dialect of Wu is the Suzhou dialect, though due to its large population, Shanghainese is today sometimes considered the prestige dialect. Note that Wu is the term used by scholars and an endonym by many of its speakers is 'Jiangnan speech' (江南話) or 'Jiangsu-Zhejiang speech', or 'Jiangzhe speech' (江浙話). Another term for Wu Chinese, less used often is 'Wuyue speech' (吳越語), often a reference to the two kingdoms of Wu and Yue, and/or to the kingdom of Wuyue.

Among speakers of other Chinese languages, Wu is often subjectively judged to be soft, light, and flowing. There is even a special term used to describe these qualities of Wu speech (simplified Chinese: 吴侬软语; traditional Chinese: 吳儂軟語; pinyin: wúnóngruǎnyǔ). The actual source of this impression is harder to place. It is likely a combination of many factors. Among speakers of Wu, for example, Shanghainese is considered softer and mellower than the variant spoken in Ningbo, although some Wu speakers still insist that old standard Suzhou dialect is more pleasant and beautiful than the dialects of Shanghai and Ningbo.

Like other varieties of Chinese, there is disagreement as to whether Wu should be considered a language of its own or as a dialect of a Chinese language. By the standard of mutual intelligibility, Wu is a language separate from Mandarin, Cantonese, and other varieties of Chinese. However, it does not have a standardized form as Mandarin does; it is seldom written, as Wu speakers write in Vernacular Chinese, with grammar and vocabulary centred on Standard Mandarin (with a few allowances for regional variation) rather than on Wu.

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