Taihu Wu (吳語太湖片) or Northern Wu (北部吳語) is a Wu Chinese language spoken in much of the southern part of the province of Jiangsu, including Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, the southern part of Nantong, Jingjiang and Danyang; the municipality of Shanghai; and the northern part of Zhejiang province, including Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Ningbo, Huzhou, and Jiaxing. A notable exception is the dialect of the town of Jinxiang, which is a linguistic exclave of Taihu Wu in Zhenan Min-speaking Cangnan county of Wenzhou prefecture in Zhejiang province. Speakers in regions around Taihu Lake and Hangzhou Bay, are the largest population among all Wu speakers. Taihu Wu dialects such as Shanghainese, Shaoxing and Ningbo are mutually intelligible even for L2 Taihu speakers.
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Taihu Wu in the context of Written Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the city of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Shanghainese, like the rest of the Wu language group, is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese, such as Mandarin.
Shanghainese belongs to a separate group of the Taihu Wu subgroup. With nearly 14 million speakers, Shanghainese is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese. Since the late 19th century, it has served as the lingua franca of the entire Yangtze River Delta region, but in recent decades its status has declined relative to Mandarin, which most Shanghainese speakers can also speak.
Taihu Wu in the context of Jiangyin dialect
The Jiangyin dialect (Chinese: 江阴话; pinyin: Jiāngyīnhuà) is a Northern Wu Chinese dialect spoken in the city of Jiangyin in Jiangsu province. The Jiangyin dialect is a member of the Wu Chinese Taihu Wu family of dialects, which means the inhabitants speak a dialect similar to that of nearby Wuxi, Changzhou, Suzhou, and Shanghai. The Jiangyin dialect itself is of the Piling variety, related to the Changzhou dialect. The Jiangyin dialect has the highest degree of mutual intelligibility with the dialects of the closest neighboring cities of Changzhou and Wuxi but also has a fairly large degree of mutual intelligibility with the dialects of nearby Suzhou and Shanghai. As one travels south towards Wuxi away from the urban center of Jiangyin, the Jiangyin dialect increasingly sounds closer to the Wuxi dialect.
A book called A collection of Jiangyin dialect has been published.