Abstract A framework for dialectal Chinese speech recognition is proposed and studied, in which a relatively small dialectal Chinese (or in other words Chinese influenced by the native dialect) speech corpus and dialect-related knowledge are adopted to transform a standard Chinese (or Putonghua, abbreviated as PTH) speech recognizer into a dialectal Chinese speech recognizer. Two kinds of knowledge sources are explored: one is experts knowledge and the other is a small dialectal Chinese corpus. These knowledge sources provide information on four levels: phonetics level, lexicon level, language level, and the acoustic decoder level. This paper takes Wu dialectal Chinese (WDC) as an example target language. Our goal was to establish a WDC speech recognizer from an existing PTH speech recognizer based on the Initial-Final structure of the Chinese language and a study of how dialectal Chinese speakers speak Putonghua, we propose to use context-independent PTH-IF mappings (where IF means ei...