Deciding how to classify dialects is generally an inexact science. Classification can proceed by identifying common characteristics within a dialect group as well as by identifying characteristics that distinguish it from other groups. It would be great if a large-scale common characteristic of a dialect group is also unique to it.
The Wu dialect group has many interesting characteristics that set it apart from the other Chinese dialects, but one that is very consistent is the existence of a full complement of voiced initial consonants. This observation about the speech of a cultural area in eastern China is nowadays taken as a major defining characteristic of the Wu dialect group.
[Aside: Both N. Qian and B. Xu argued that in some Wu dialects, "voiced" consonants are not fully voiced, but actually a cluster composed of an "unvoiced" consonant followed by a voiced aspirant. The point remains, however, that there is an additional class of initials in the Wu dialect apart from the unvoiced initials.]
While in Standard Chinese, all initials are unvoiced, in the Wu dialect group, nearly all articulation positions come with a voiced counterpart. Or put another way, the Wu dialect group preserves all the voiced/unvoiced distinctions in what is known to exist in Middle Chinese. For example, within the bilabials, the Wu dialect has /b/ in addition to the usual /p/, /pʰ/.
The geographic range of the Wu dialect group is quite large. It covers much of the coastal region of eastern China. It is widely spoken in southern Jiangsu Province, nearly all of Zhejiang Province, the municipality of Shanghai, and in dialect islands, in certain parts of northeastern Jiangxi Province, northwestern Fujian Province, southern Anhui Province, and even Hubei Province (G. Fu).
The Wu-speaking region is bounded on the north by a thin strip of land just north of the Yangtze River; rougly Jingjiang, Haimen, Qidong form a boundary. In the south, Pucheng (Fujian), Jingning, and Cangnan form a boundary. The western boundary runs along Langxi (Anhui), Kaihua, Shangrao (Jiangxi), and the eastern boundary is the East China Sea, including most offshore islands, but surprisingly not on the larger Zhoushan Island, where Southern Min, a dialect of much further south, is spoken (Y. Yan).
These boundaries are always changing, of course. On the northern shores of the Yangtze River, traditional Wu speaking areas are being influenced by population influx from the neighboring regions of Northern Chinese dialects.
The Wu-speaking population in China is estimated to be about 77 million in 1984.
Through the compilations of various provincial almanacs and other linguistic field research, a number of geographic datapoints in the Wu-speaking areas has been established so that by the 1980s, there could be important discussions on subdivisions within the Wu dialect. The principal tactic of subdivision is to find smaller differences, usually exceptions unique to a certain region, within the framework of all of the accepted common characteristics of the Wu dialect group.
There have been proposals to divide the Wu dialect group into two parts—into northern and southern subdialects, but this was found unworkable, so instead, the Wu dialect is now commonly divided into five subdialects, with smaller regional variations yet within each. The five subdialects are the Lake Tai, Taizhou, Wenzhou, Wuzhou, and Liqu subdialects. Of those, the Lake Tai subdialect in the north spans the most area and has the most speakers (S. Weng).
There is a lot of diversity within the Wu dialect group, such that there are noticeable differences within a subdialect and low mutual intelligibility between speakers of the northern Lake Tai subdialect, for example, and speakers of the southern Wenzhou subdialect.
The question
also came up as to how there had gotten to be so many dialects in China and
specifically how the Wu dialect formed. The precise origin of Chinese dialects
is an unresolved question of anthropology, but two of the ways that dialects
in China may have formed are as follows. One is that, as certain
Chinese-speaking groups moved into remote, isolated, or mountainous parts of
the country, they developed distinct ways of speech. Another is that, as
Chinese-speaking groups and governments migrated from the center, they
interacted with other inhabitants, at least some of whom were indigenous and
not Chinese-speaking. In the course of historical development, the indigenous
speech also influenced the version of Chinese spoken there.
The Wu dialect group is an old one -- it can be traced back at least 2600 years to the times of the Warring States (see map at right). Records show that the ruling class of the Wu and Yue Kingdoms already used a form of Chinese during this period and that this was further reinforced at a later time by influx into the region from Chu. It was mentioned by the professors that the Wu dialect should really be properly called the Wu-Yue dialect, because Wu was annexed by Yue early on. In any case, by the 500s CE, contemporary scholars noted a definitively distinct dialect of Chinese in the historical Wu-Yue regions and Wu was the name they designated it. The modern Wu dialect family that bears the historical name developed from this stock, but it is said that the epitome of the "original" Wu dialect moved southward and, some believe, gave rise to the modern Min dialects.
The Wu dialect also received influence from minority languages. The following example was given by more than one professor interviewed. The sound /pʰɑʊ/ means a specific kind of fruit (rather like a grapefruit) in some southern parts of the Wu speaking area. But there has not been found a character specifically for it in records, though some attribute a character meaning a kind of sack or bladder to stand for the meaning of the fruit. However, in southeastern Asian languages, for instance, this kind of fruit is called something close to /pʰɑʊ/. A few other such examples exist to indicate that certain lexical distinctions in the Wu dialect are results of influence from non-Chinese languages.
The phonetic system reconstructed as Middle Chinese is the one in the ancient rhyme book (1169 CE) called Guang Yun. This book was based on an even earlier rhyme book called the Qie Yun. Middle Chinese is very important for dialect research because it gives the template for figuring the phonetic system of dialects today as well as giving a reference for reconstructing the phonetic systems of earlier forms of Chinese. However, Guang Yun is not a phonetic record, but a phonetic categorization.
[Aside: B. Xu said that the phonetic system implicated by Guang Yun may be of one phonetic system or it may be a compound of two phonetic systems based on several pieces of evidence. 1. Middle Chinese reconstruction based on the Guang Yun has an unusually large number of phonemes, more than Archaic Chinese or any modern Chinese dialect; 2. There must have been dialect differences at the time of compilation; 3. There were 4 scholars from Jinlin (i.e. Nanjing today) and 2 scholars from Luoyang who worked out rhymes together and as they encountered different pronunciations, they may have set up two rhyme categories.]
So, the first thing to do in Wu dialect research is to compare the Wu dialect to the phonetic categorization of Guang Yun. In some respects, the Wu dialect is simpler phonetically than Middle Chinese (e.g. stop final distinctions are lost), but in other respects it is more complex (e.g. separate tonal registers for voiced/unvoiced distinctions within each sheng category of Guang Yun).
Dialects continue to undergo change. Within the Wu dialect, strata of past change exist in the various forms of character readings, with the literary reading and colloquial reading different for certain characters.
In more recent times, the intrinsic trend is one of merging of vowel clusters and tones; this is especially rapid in the more urban regions of the Wu dialect. In Shanghai, which has seen some of the most drastic changes, those attempting to describe the phonetic attributes of the Shanghai dialect are confronted with at least three major phonetic systems, ranging the older, middle, and younger generations (N. Qian). In suburbs and outlying areas, older forms of the Shanghai dialect remain. Similar processes go on, albeit at a slower pace, in urban centers smaller than Shanghai across the Wu-speaking region.
An extrinsic trend is the introduction of Standard Chinese as the common language taught in schools within the last thirty or forty years, resulting in a younger generation whose contact with the Wu dialect is at a colloquial level only. This results in sound and lexical borrowings, from Standard Chinese into the Wu dialect, that may become a new permanent stratum (N. Qian).
The origin of all dialect research in China was based on the study of characters and their sounds. This began as early as the Han Dynasty, with works like Shuo Wen Jie Zi, which explained the construction of characters and made internal references to their sounds. Later, the rhyme books—Qie Yun, Guang Yun, etc. also made full inventories of the sound system of Chinese (B. Xu). By later dynasties, it was evident that the Chinese language had changed, such that grammatically, there were works to explain the classics with the language of the time, and phonetically, scholars pointed out earlier rhymes no longer worked.
Wu dialect research using modern linguistics methods began with Zhao Yuanren’s data collection and the seminal work Xiandai Wuyu Fangyan de Yanjiu (Modern Wu Dialect Research), published 1928 (S. Weng). In fact, it was Zhao who proposed the defining characteristic of the Wu dialect, namely the voiced/unvoiced aspirated/unvoiced unaspirated tripartite for fricative and plosive initials (G. Fu). There was a large amount of important work done by many people, including large-scale data collection efforts by scholars and by the various provincial governments in China and theoretical work by people both inside and outside China. Much data was collected in the 1980s. The 33 geographical points in Zhao’s original work were revisited between 1984 and 1986 and that data, which shows dramatic differences from those collected 60 years before, was published in Dangdai Wuyu Yanjiu (Contemporary Wu Dialect Research) in 1992 (N. Qian).
There is still much to be done. Though many geographic data points are collected over time, they do not always use the same template, so the available data for comparison is less. Also, the smaller areas, like dialects of suburban Shanghai, have not been researched thoroughly. N. Qian says that up to this point, Wu dialect research is still in the stage of data collection and sound analysis. Lexicon and grammar are all areas that need to be looked at more.