侬 (nóng): you (Shanghainese/Wu dialect)

Meanings

1 you (Shanghainese/Wu dialect)
2 I; me (archaic/literary)

Characters

侬

nóng

you (dialect); I (archaic)

Contains 亻 (person radical) + 农 (farmer) as phonetic component.

Examples

HSK 1

侬好！

Nóng hǎo!

Hello! (Shanghainese)

HSK 2

侬是上海人吗？

Nóng shì Shànghǎi rén ma?

Are you from Shanghai? (Shanghainese)

Tips

register

侬 is the Shanghainese word for 'you' - equivalent to Mandarin 你. You'll hear it constantly on the streets of Shanghai but almost never in standard Mandarin. 侬好 is 'hello' in Shanghainese.

history

In classical Chinese, 侬 meant 'I/me.' The poet Li Bai used it in this sense in his verse. The meaning shifted to 'you' in Wu dialect, where it remains the standard second-person pronoun today.

Components

radical

亻 rén

person (left-side radical of 人)

Left person radical - two-stroke side-form of 人, the indexing radical for characters about people and human roles. In 侬 it grounds the pronoun in human address: a word for talking to someone face-to-face. Same family: 你 you, 他 he, 们 plural marker, 住 to live.

phonetic

农 nóng

farmer; agriculture (phonetic)

Right 农 supplies the sound nóng exactly. The agriculture meaning is not carried - 侬 is the Wu-Chinese (Shanghainese / Suzhounese) word for "you" or sometimes "I," familiar from Shanghai dialect songs and Tang-poetry quotations of southern speech. A regional pronoun preserved in writing through this clean phonetic.