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Latin, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic

I'm still learning Armenian, Georgian, Aramaic-Syriac and a few Brahmic scripts.

Native Language: English Mother Tongue, Native, yet almost not-quite Native: Wu Chinese (Shanghainese) Heritage Auxilliary tongue: Mandarin Chinese, Classical Chinese English is Northeastern American dialect/accent Wu Chinese is Shanghainese with influences from Ningbo/Zhoushan dialect Mandarin acce...

Good: Georgian Syriac Wu Chinese (e.g. Shanghainese, my mother tongue; I know I'm biased) Not bad: Persian Armenian Occitan other Caucasian languages Bad: Northern Mandarin dialects (Northeastern Mandarin and actual Beijing dialect sound the worst; very rhotic and too much of those retroflex fricati...

I did notice some devoicing in the Xuanzhou Wu dialect.

No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to pronounce [r] or any trill. It often comes out as something like [ɣ] or some other fricative.

1. Where were you born? New York City 2. What is your native language? American English, Wu Chinese (mother tongue- fluent in Shanghainese, but a partial, passive speaker of Ningbo dialect) 3. What other languages besides English and your native language do you know? French and Mandarin (I'm not flu...

Shanghainese is essentially mostly a mix between Ningbo dialect and an old Songjiang dialect (closely related to Suzhou dialect). Much of the vocabulary is largely derived from that old dialect, but its phonology is influenced by Ningbo dialect, with small influences elsewhere, such as Jianghuai Man...

Mandarin codas in [n] are all allophonic in Shanghainese, just like in other Wu dialects. SO [n] coda could be [null], [nasal vowel coda] or [ɲ]. (Actually, any nasal coda in Middle Chinese is now allophonic in Shanghainese/ other Wu I saw no strong evidence for this. The informants had a difficult...

I am a 'native' speaker of Shanghainese (my heritage language), so I couldn't really ignore this thread. I do have some issues with the paper itself. Mandarin codas in [n] are all allophonic in Shanghainese, just like in other Wu dialects. SO [n] coda could be [null], [nasal vowel coda] or [ɲ]. (Act...