Sino-Tibetan · ISO 639-3 wuu
Wu Chinese Language 吳語
Wu Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by about 84 million people in 1 country. It is written in the Simplified Han script.
Where Wu Chinese is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
Countries that speak Wu Chinese
Language family
- Sino-Tibetan
- Sinitic
- Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Wu-Hui Chinese
- Wuic
- Wu Chinese
Writing system
Simplified Han script
Related languages
About the Wu Chinese language
Wu Chinese (吳語) is spoken by about 84 million people, which makes it the 20th most spoken language in the world — just behind Vietnamese (85 million) and ahead of Swahili (82 million). It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and, more precisely, to the Wuic group within the Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic branch.
Where is Wu Chinese spoken?
Wu Chinese is used in 1 country. The largest communities live in China (85 million).
Wu Chinese is not a national official language anywhere.
Writing system and status
Wu Chinese is written in the Simplified Han script. It is a safe, widely transmitted language: children still learn it at home as their first language.
Its closest relatives in the same branch of the family are Huizhou Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese, Jinyu Chinese, Hakka Chinese, Xiang Chinese and 2 more.
ISO codes: ISO 639-3 wuu.
Frequently asked questions about Wu Chinese
How many people speak Wu Chinese?
Where is Wu Chinese spoken?
What language family does Wu Chinese belong to?
What is Wu Chinese called in Wu Chinese?
Is Wu Chinese an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.