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As anywhere in China, Mandarin is the lingua franca; nearly everyone can speak it except some of the elderly. As elsewhere in China, English is not widespread but some people speak it quite well.
The region does have its own language group, called Wu. This is a populous region and the number of Wu native speakers is large; at 78 million it is rather more than French or Italian. The language is also referred to as Shanghai dialect or Shanghainese, though that is not strictly accurate. There are local variants of Wu; the prestige dialect is that of Suzhou an older city, capital of the Kingdom of Wu centuries back, and home to many scholars, not that of Shanghai. Wu is spoken over quite a broad area, including Shanghai, most of Zhejiang, parts of Jiangsu and even a few places in Anhui. Dialects of Mandarin are spoken natively in northern Jiangsu, such as the area around Nanjing.
