Shanghainese Word Frequency (v1.0): a spoken-weighted frequency list with rank uncertainty

Transcription conventions affect some counts: 仔 and 哉 never occur in the conversations while 了 occurs 972 times. No native speaker has reviewed the list.</p><p dir="ltr">Sources (counts only; no source text is redistributed). Spoken: MagicData, ASR-CShhiDiaCSC Chinese Shanghai Dialect Conversational Speech Corpus, via the Hugging Face copy TingChen-ppmc/Shanghai_Dialect_Conversational_Speech_Corpus, revision f10f366.

Written: the Wu Chinese Wikipedia dump of 2026-09-01, filtered to colloquial Shanghai-type Wu: 2,405 of 48,393 articles, 459,388 tokens. Historical check, not part of the ranking: Pott (1907) and Edkins (1868) from

Project

Gutenberg, 34,534 tokens; 86% / 81% / 77% of the top 100 / 300 / 500 words appear there.</p><p dir="ltr">Method. OpenCC conversion and a hand-written spelling map (the transcripts write 吾 for 我, and 伐 for both the question particle and the negator 勿); two context rules for 伐 and 呃 showed about 2–5% error in hand-checked samples of 80. Segmentation uses a 3,113-entry hand-written lexicon with a unigram model re-estimated by hard EM; particles such as 仔, 个 and 伐 are words and are never joined to a neighbour.

Each word has a Wu Association romanisation, part of speech, flags and an English gloss written for this dataset. The release rebuilds byte for byte from pinned sources (seed 20260926).</p><p dir="ltr">Files. The zip holds the list (output/shanghainese_word_frequency.tsv), per-source counts, JSON files with every quoted number, the lexicon, the code and the documentation.</p><p dir="ltr">Licence.

CC0 1.0: the release contains only counts, statistics and original lexicon, glosses and code. The source corpora keep their own licences (MagicData: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0) and are not redistributed.</p><p dir="ltr">Compiled by the <a href="verbavia.com/words/shanghainese/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">Verbavia project</a>. With thanks to MagicData, the contributors to the Wu Chinese Wikipedia, F. L. Hawks Pott and J. Edkins.</p>