The Wu Chinese language
and how it is written

Where Wu Chinese ranks

Wu Chinese is the 26th most-spoken language in the world by total speakers ^[1,2]. Here it is among its neighbours in the ranking, on one scale.

“How are you?” in Wu Chinese

The design of Chinese characters

Each character writes one syllable and one unit of meaning, so the script maps onto morphemes rather than sounds. Characters fit a square, and most combine a meaning component (radical) with a sound component^[5,4]. Mainland China and Singapore use the simplified forms introduced in the 1950s^[6].

Logographic. Each character writes a word or meaningful part of one.

Kind

Logographic

Direction

Left to right

Took shape

Oracle-bone inscriptions date from the Shang dynasty, around 1200 BCE; simplified forms from the 1950s

Line of descent

Oracle-bone script → Bronze script → Seal script → Clerical script → Regular script → Simplified

Traditional surface

Scrolls

Own digits

〇 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九

Also writes

普通话 Mandarin Chinese

• Everything fits a square

  Whether a character has one stroke or thirty, it occupies the same square cell, which is why Chinese text sets in a perfect grid with no word spaces^[5].

• Meaning plus sound

  Most characters are built from a semantic part and a phonetic part: 妈 (mā, mother) pairs 女 'woman' with 马 (mǎ), borrowed for its sound^[5].

• One code, many countries

  Unicode encodes a character shared by Chinese, Japanese and Korean once (Han unification), and the font decides the regional shape, which is why the same text can look subtly different in Tokyo and Beijing^[5].

• A language hidden by its writing

  Because Wu speakers write standard Chinese, 83 million people speak a language that most of the world never sees on the page^[4,3].

Explore the letters

Numbers in Chinese characters

Wu Chinese's relatives among the 38

Wu Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family (Sinitic). These are the other languages with 50 million or more speakers in the same family; the closest — in the same branch — come first.

• 普通话Mandarin ChineseSame branch: Sinitic · 1.2B
• 粵語Cantonese (Yue Chinese)Same branch: Sinitic · 86M

Wu Chinese across the hub

The main page compares all 38 languages. Each link opens it on Wu Chinese.

• Preview it in the explorer →with all 38 side by side
• Hear it in the voice tour →“How are you?” in every language, spoken in turn
• Trace its script's family tree →from the first alphabets and Chinese oracle bones
• Compare its digits →ten ways to write 0–9
• See its share of speakers →an interactive breakdown by script, family and region

Sources

1. Ethnologue — What are the top 200 most spoken languages? (2026)
2. Wikipedia — List of languages by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2026 figures, retrieved October 2026)
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Wu language
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Chinese languages
5. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 18: East Asia (Han, Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul)
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Modern Standard Chinese language
7. Omniglot — Useful phrases in Shanghainese (Wu)

Checked October 25, 2026. Speaker numbers are Ethnologue's 2026 estimates, which count each language separately (Arabic and Chinese varieties are listed one by one). Maps shade whole countries, not regions within them. Found an error? Tell us.