The language is very different in pronunciation from Mandarin and Cantonese, there are several sounds that are not found in any other Chinese dialect. The bulk of the vocabulary is the same, but there's lots of variations and unique words and phrases. Like any dialect rooted in one place, it has more colour and richness than an official compromise language such as Mandarin.

Shanghainese is part of the Wu dialect family, one of the five dialect groups into which Chinese can be divided (the others are northern Chinese including Mandarin, Cantonese, the Fujian dialects and Hakka / Kejia). The Wu dialect covers a vast area of eastern China - the whole extended Yangtse River delta - and includes lots of variations in even the most basic words, like I, we, you. There is quite a lot of classical opera-type culture in the Wu dialect - there's "Huju" - Shanghainese opera, and pingtan - the story-telling / singing of Suzhou. There were a couple of novels written in Shanghainese around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries but the experiment was not viewed as successful, and they have sunk without trace with no follow-up.

Which is not surprising considering the overall opinion of Shanghainese people towards their own language (a wise man once said, by the way, that the difference between and a language and a dialect is that a language has an army and a navhy). Getting Shanghainese people to treat Shanghainese seriously is not an easy task. They often describe it as ugly, rough and uncultured. Definitely unsuitable for pop singing, for instance.

One Shanghainese lady, someone highly (overly?) educated outside her place of birth, told me recently that it was impossible to hold a conversation in Shanghainese on a weighty subject - the meaning of life, the future of the Internet, the derivation of the name Haagen-Dazs, things like that. It has to be done in Mandarin, she said. Other Shanghainese I tried this line on poo-poo-ed it. But it seems to be representative of a sense of inferiority that surrounds the language/dialect.

Take music, for instance. I do. All the time.

There are countless kara-oke bars and halls in Shanghai. They have musical selections consisting of thousands of Mandarin tunes and hundreds of others in Cantonese, Taiwanese, English, and Japanese. Shanghainese kara-oke fans love to sing songs in Cantonese, even though they can't speak it. But how about a kara-oke song in Shanghainese? Sorry, Mmm-mat-le.

In Cantonese, you can watch old movies where they speak basically like they do today. There are no old movies in Shanghainese. Even back in the 1930s, they made movies in Shanghai with Mandarin soundtracks. There is Cantonese pop music - it's been going strong for 20 years now, and it's heard far beyond the borders of Hong Kong or even Guangdong province. There is effectively no Shanghainese pop music. In the popular magazines and newspapers of Hong Kong, you will find a written form of Cantonese (barbaric though it looks). Such a thing hardly exists in Shanghainese. Lastly, Cantonese can be heard on radio and on TV, on videos and laser discs. In Shanghai - effectively nothing. It's all Mandarin by government decree.

Very strange.

In shop signs and advertising, little hints of the dialect peak through every now and then. There's a department store in Xijiahui called Ji Di, which literally means Lucky Emperor. But the sounds "ji di" in Shanhghainese mean "How much?". Coincidence? Unlikely. The word "nong" (you) appears quite often in shop names. There's a wedding photo salon on Huaihai Lu called Nong Nong, aslthough given the narcissiistic atmosphere in those places, I think it would be better called "Ngu Ngu" (me me). But these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

The reasons for this deplorable state of affairs seem to be as follows:

First, Shanghai is a young immigrant city, only 150 years old, and Shanghai as it is spoken today is an amalgam of all sorts of influences, definitely different from the Shanghai dialect spoken in the Yu Garden in the year 1840. There are elements, I am told, of Ningbo, and touches of Wuxi and Suzhou. So there is isn't the strong sense with Shanghainese of the "standard" pronunciation and of the solid cultural background that makes, for instance, Cantonese so strong.

Second, the immigrant tradition continues, and according to one estimate, as many as 30 percent of the population of Shanghai are not Shanghainese. People from other province often seem to have trouble learning the dialect. After a couple of years, they can understand a large amount of what's being said, but talking remains a problem. It's like the poor Mainland people struggling with Cantonese in Hong Kong.

And thirdly, Shanghainese is not actively promoted. Virtually all radio and television stations operate in Mandarin. Callers to live radio talk shows who break into Shanghainese are answered in Mandarin and gently asked to speak in the dialect of the north. Instruction in schools is exclusively in Mandarin. The result is that the language is becoming gradually more Mandarin-ised - for many words, Shanghai-ified versions of Mandarin terms now co-exist with the original Shanghainese terms. Many people, particularly the more educated, talk what I am sure will never be widely called Manghainese - Mandarin words get thrown into a Shanghainese framework as English words are into Hong Kong Cantonese. With time, it is a safe assumption that many of the Shanghai terms will fall away. And more's the pity.

There's a flip-side to this process, though. If Shanghai is destined to be the financial powerhouse of China as it hopes, then it will probably have an effect on the language, too. Standard Mandarin today has very much the flavour of northern China - the full "sh" sound as opposed to the "s" sound of the south, but I'd put some money on that changing over the next few decades.

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The first phrase of Shanghainese I ever learned was "Jinjiang Hotel". It was one of only two hotels foreigners were allowed to stay in back in those days at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

I was first here in Shanghai in 1979, and the city was dark and full of the ghosts of the past. I looked out of a window and saw a sign on the side of the building next door which said: "Kelly and Walsh, booksellers". I hated Shanghai then. It seemed like such a hopeless place, a city which had once been great and colourful and dynamic, on a par with London and New York, ground down to a grey mediocrity. What a waste. From the perspective of 1979, with Deng Xiaoping only just back once more from the political wilderness and Cultural Revolution slogans about class struggle plastered all over the place, there seemed to be little hope of any basic change. Shanghai was a city of the past with nothing to look forward to.

Through much of the 1980s, Shanghai was viewed as politically hard-line, difficult to do business in, suspicious of the capitalist ideas being implemented in Guangdong province to the south. Beijing, it was said, viewed Shanghai with suspicion and worked consciously to stunt its growth. There was little change evident when I visited the city again in mid-1989 for a couple of days. I stayed at the Hilton Hotel, a modern skyscraper which seemed desperately out of place in a sea of 1920s slum housing, an outpost from another world.

And that was pretty well it for six years. The city I found when I came to live in Shanghai in October 1995 was a revelation. It was a city on the move. With the so-called "Shanghai Faction" in power in Beijing, the shackles had been removed and the city was developing at an unbelievably fast pace. The biggest urban renewal project since Paris in the 1880s, said one writer.

Mid-1990s Shanghai seemed have broken loose of many of the elements which made living in the old New China so frustrating. It was possible to have local Chinese friends, to go out to dinner and local bars, to be NORMAL. Politics was not the only topic of conversation. In fact, nobody cared about it at all, and when I attempted jokes which harked back to political campaigns or half-forgotten proletarian figures like Lei Feng, I was treated by Shanghainese with patronising contempt. I was out of tune with the times in a major way. Thankfully.

I decided even before I got Shanghai that I was going to have a go at learning the language. I speak Cantonese and Mandarin, and wanted to see how far I could get with another Chinese dialect. I threw myself into it from the first day, and started putting together word lists. It was like stumbling into an uncharted world.

No, that's unfair to those who have put a lot of work into documenting the dialects of eastern China. It's not uncharted, but the charts that exist are basically for academics only. There was no popular tourist guide to this linguistic world at all. The foreigners who lived in Shanghai in the old days never bothered to learn Chinese. Those who did were viewed as being decidedly odd.

I once met a guy named Spencer Moosa in Taipei. It was the early 1980s and he was the local stringer for the London Daily Telegraph. He's dead now, and at the time, he was already pretty old, probably somewhere around 80 years old. He was born in Shanghai, into an Armenian Jewish family, and spent his entire early life there, except for two years of college in Canada. When the Communists came in 1949, he sought refuge with the Nationalist armies and Chiang Kai-shek over in Taipei and had lived there ever since, working for the Government Information Office. We had lunch together one day and then down on the street, he hailed a taxi.

"Ask him to take me to the GIO," he said. And so I did. But I was amazed. Here was a man who had lived in China for 80 years, with a break of only two years in his teens, who could not speak a word of the language spoken around him, couldn't even tell the taxi driver how to get to work.

He was no exception.

Again in the early 1980s, I once visited an old people's home in the northeast city of Harbin that had been used by the Chinese authorities to gather together all the stateless foreigners washed up on the shores of New China. There were a few White Russians, several Japanese women left over from the Japanese occupation, and ... Marjorie and Seraphim Fuller, two stateless Americans, mother and daughter. Their story was fascinating. Seraphim was born into a Polish Jewish family in Harbin when the city was run by the Russians before the Bolshevik revolution. She moved to Shanghai when she was young and met a Chinese-American sailor surnamed Fuller, married him and bore him a daughter. Mr Fuller disappeared somewhere along the line, and after the Japanese left Shanghai in 1945, mother and daughter took out Chinese citizenship. But, it turned out, they chose the wrong China. When the Communists arrived, their Nationalist passports were useless. They and other stateless foreigners - mostly Russians and gypsies - were gathered together in what Marjorie described as a concentration camp near Shanghai. They spent more than 20 years there, all through the madness of the Cultural Revolution. Gradually, the other inmates found a way out - mostly going to Australia or Brazil - and in 1979, Marjorie and Seraphim were the only two left, and they were shipped up to Harbin, to the foreigners' old peoples home.

Anyway, the point is that, again, neither of them spoke any Chinese at all. When they had something to say to their guards / caretakers, Seraphim would speak to one of the Russian ladies who spoke Chinese who would pass it on.

Given this attitude towards learning Chinese, it is not surprising that there appear to be no "How To Learn Shanghainese" books from the old days. And the tourist guide books of the times include almost no Chinese phrases either. Foreigners communicated with local Chinese, when absolutely necessary, using pidgin English: "one whisky soda, chop-chop", etc.

Nowadays, foreigners learn Chinese in droves, but the dialect they learn is Mandarin. Which makes sense, of course. It works effectively everywhere you go in China, not just Shanghai.

But if you live in Shanghai, my experience suggests it's worth learning Shanghainese too. Mandarin is a second language for Shanghainese just as it is for foreigners, and they feel much more at ease in their own dialect. You can hear it in the way Shanghai officials give speeches. They start out trying hard to speak Mandarin, but by the second page, their pronunciation is lapsing back into Shanghainese. Also, Shanghainese people use their own dialect as a secret language when foreigners and people from other parts of China are around, and I see no reason why their faith in the impenetrability of their dialect shouldn't be shaken!

The more you learn, the more you can pick up, it's obvious but true. especially if you already understand Mandarin or Cantonese, it's not dramatically difficult. The grammar is almost identical and beyond that it's a matter of learning the vocabulary, then word substitution. Actually more important than that is learning the lilt and feel of the language. The lack of radio and television broadcasts in Shanghainese certainly doesn't help people trying to learn it.

The grammar of Shanghainese has similarities with both Mandarin and Cantonese. Like Mandarin, it's "give me money" not "give money me". But like Cantonese, Shanghainese does not use the "ba" pattern, as in phrases like "Ba light turn off". It's just a straight: "Turn off light".

The pronunciation of words in Shanghainese varies from Mandarin and Cantonese according to various rules, not all of which I've figured out yet. but the patterns are there. It retains the glottal stops of ancient Chinese, as has Cantonese, but they are more abrupt than Cantonese. Swallow that last letter! The tones are tricky, more than Mandarin, about the same number as Cantonese, but slippery as eels! In Cantonese, words retain the same tone regardless of context (with only a few exceptions), but Shanghainese has words changing tones all over the place.

Languages keep on changing. The Shanghainese of today is different in some respects from that spoken by Shanghainese ??migr??s living in Hong Kong, for instance. It's harder, and there are differences in vocabulary. The most common way of saying "very" - law (as in law haw - very good) is viewed by the older exiles as being unacceptable. They prefer "jiaw guei" for very. "Money" now is "chaw piaw". Fifty years ago, it was "dong di", and that's the way the exiles still prefer it. In Shanghai, of course, they couldn't care less what the exiles think. Just give us the "chaw piaw".

Will the growth of Shanghai over the next couple of decades change things for the city's dialect? Make it stronger or weaker? How about technology? As the hundreds of video channels on the satellites above Asia begin to fill up, will we eventually see Shanghainese channels? Shanghainese radio stations delivered over the Internet?

Stay tuned to find out.