You think they'll speak shanghainese in this?
*hopes so*
if movies have canto, why not shanghainese? more people speak it than canto.
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There's no such language called shanghainese. theres only canto or mandrin
By your FNC
I'm from Shanghai and I assure you that there is a language called Shanghainese.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghainese
way to be ignorant dude
sharelol, I thought they were just trying to be funny. Who knew!?
shareShanghainese is nothing but a dialect, definition of a dialect is that the pronouciation or the way of speech is different than the norm but you write it the same, which is officially Manderin in China.
PS: cantoneese is dialect too, only people in hongkong still write the old style chinese, but the majority of cantoneese speaking people in china really do write the simplified chinese as everywhere else in china !
This is a confusing (and somewhat wrong) explanation, since even Mandarin is a dialect, it's just the official dialect used so that people can communicate with each other in China.
Anyways, there are a LOT of different dialects of Chinese, and in fact, not all of them are actually written the same-many dialects will have words that do not exist in the normal Chinese written language.
Basically if the same words exist then obviously the written language will be the same, it's just pronounced differently (often DRASTICALLY so, although the word has the same meaning it can sound totally different). This however, does not mean that these are "just" dialects, since they've been true languages for thousands of years from back when China wasn't just one country.
They are in fact true languages, and include different grammar and sometimes even include different words that do not exist at all in the normal written Chinese language (although nowadays people will usually just approximate the word using a similar sounding word...which is confusing, especially to anybody reading who doesn't know that particular dialect that the word is trying to approximate), especially if you're typing stuff online you're limited to what the computer can display, so there's no way of typing the rarer dialect words.
Think of it this way, french and english share a lot of word roots and are written using the same letters but they're not the same language. In the case of the Chinese dialects, the grammar structure is very much shared amongst dialects, with minor variations (MUCH more similar than french vs english for example, think german grammar vs english grammar but even more similar than that), but pronunciation is basically crazy different.
I guess the best analogy would be if French and English words were spelled the same and had more similar grammar, but you'd still prounounce either the French way or the English way-the languages would then sound totally different, share the same words, and be readable to people who speak either French or English, but still be separate languages.
Dunno if I just made it more confusing or less, but that's your language lesson for the day. And if you have no idea what the difference is between French and English or German grammar, umm well, just imagine if other langauges wrote their words the same as english but kept their own pronounciations and you'd have the idea behind all the different dialects.
BTW a lot of the dialects existed long before anybody came up with the modern chinese written language, so to claim that they are "just" dialects and not true languages is idiotic, a language doesn't have to be written to be a true language, there are tons of languages that didn't or don't have written forms.
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