Shanghainese is the variety of Wu Chinese spoken in Shanghai, China's largest city, and is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. Wu, the branch of Chinese used around the Yangtze delta in Zhejiang and southern Jiangsu, preserves voiced initial consonants lost elsewhere in Chinese, and Shanghainese has a much-reduced tone system compared with Mandarin. Estimates for speakers of Shanghainese proper generally run to ten million or more, with the wider Wu group counted in the tens of millions. Like other Chinese varieties it is written in Chinese characters, though almost all formal writing follows Mandarin norms. Decades of promotion of Mandarin in schools and media mean many younger Shanghai residents understand the language better than they speak it, and local campaigns now encourage its use.
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