Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log Suzhou rap sounds like it has a French accent

Suzhou rap sounds like it has a French accent

Language Log 2025-02-22

From Chas Belov:  

Google Translate says that this song is in Suzhou topolect (it actually says "dialect" but thanks to you I know better). But I had to recognize a few words before I could convince myself it wasn't in French (which I also don't know). Later in the song it sounds more Chinese, but the rapper never really loses that French sound. Am I imagining things?

【苏州方言RAP】红中 Zyh 《三十三》PROD BY XVIBE

LISTEN HERE

If you want to check your hearing, here's the title and most frequently repeated phrase:

MSM sānshísān

Shanghai 1se-zeq8-1se

三十三

"33"

Suzhounese (sou1 tseu1 ghe2 gho6 蘇州閒話) is the variety of Sinitic traditionally spoken in the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu, China. Suzhounese is a topolect of the Wu group of the Sinitic family of languages, and was traditionally considered the prestige variety of Wu.  The Wu group has a total of 83,000,000 speakers.  Among them, Suzhounese is close to Shanghainese and other Wu topolects in the region.  Suzhounese has a large vowel inventory and it is relatively conservative in initials by preserving voiced consonants from Middle Sinitic. (source, with supplements)

The Wu varieties, especially that of Suzhou, are traditionally perceived as soft in the ears of speakers of both Wu and non-Wu languages, leading to the idiom "the tender speech of Wu" (wúnóngruǎnyǔ吴侬软语; 吳儂軟語).  (Wikipedia)

Does that remind you of Parisian French?

All languages have a genius.  Although far apart, it's conceivable that two completely unrelated tongues may possess certain similarities due to environmental or other circumstances.  Conversely, two cognate languages that are physically close to each other may sound very different as a result of diverse criteria.  Think of the tremendous linguistic variation of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.  And people are always telling me how different Swabian is from other types of German.  Here's an interesting example:

In 2009, the word Muggeseggele (a Swabian idiom), meaning the scrotum of a housefly, was voted in a readers' survey by Stuttgarter Nachrichten, the largest newspaper in Stuttgart, as the most beautiful Swabian word, well ahead of any other term.[8] The expression is used in an ironic way to describe a small unit of measure and is deemed appropriate to use in front of small children (compare Bubenspitzle). German broadcaster SWR's children's website, Kindernetz, explained the meaning of Muggeseggele in their Swabian dictionary in the Swabian-based TV series Ein Fall für B.A.R.Z.

(Wikipedia)

I once owned a dictionary of Schwäbisch, and it was quite entertaining just to read through it.

 

Selected readings