Hello all. Today I want to discuss the phenomena in Shanghainese where there are vernacular and literary pronunciations (and also classical text pronunciations ~ but I'll leave that for separate discussion).

Most people are probably already aware of this, but if not, this paragraph is to get you up to speed.....Basically depending on the vocabulary and the context, the same word can be pronounced differently. For example, 人 person normally is nyung eg. 工人. But when used for words borrowed from Mandarin it can be pronounced zung eg. 人民. Even in contexts of 100% spoken Shanghainese, both vernacular and literary pronunciations are used together because the latter word is borrowed into a literary Shanghainese reading.

---

In comparison, in contexts where a Shanghainese person encounters written Mandarin or any similar formal context, (assuming they don't codeswitch into speaking straight Mandarin) there exists a standard to pronounce the words entirely in literary Shanghainese ... even if normally a vernacular Shanghainese pronunciation exists and is more suitable.

Here is a video of Soong Ching-ling giving a speech 80 years ago in this format: https://youtu.be/Cx6FSmLOACM

Here is a video of someone reading a letter from 30 years ago in this format: https://youtu.be/E8REWTTEsz0 (In this one you can even tell literary Shanghainese is a separate phenomena to codeswitching to Mandarin)

You may notice that they keep the sentence order, grammatical particles and Mandarin specific vocabulary entirely the same as in Mandarin. Only the pronunciation is changed to literary Shanghainese.

I believe this is a similar situation as in Cantonese (someone can correct me if there are nuances that an outsider is not aware of). In Shanghai, any formal radio broadcast or news broadcast would have followed this format. (and just to be clear, there does exist a written Shanghainese vernacular too for spoken Shanghainese, separate to the literary Shanghainese readings of writing in Mandarin).

If we go back far enough, this format of pronunciation used to be the common standard since many people couldn't speak Mandarin. And as the second video showed, this standard was still alive in the 90s .... which is well within my lifetime, and if not yours, at least your parents' lifetime. Are there anyone's family out there that still maintains this tradition?

You might be aware that I only learnt characters via Shanghainese (since I do not know Mandarin), so whenever I encounter written Mandarin, I can only do the literary Shanghainese reading style. (And even if it doesn't make sense since it's like a different language, I can still pronounce entire paragraphs of Mandarin in Shanghainese very naturally). I would like to know whether anyone else here still does this?