diff --git a/spacy/language.py b/spacy/language.py
index 1d1b94d8c..6c8c7cd73 100644
--- a/spacy/language.py
+++ b/spacy/language.py
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ from thinc.neural import Model
 from thinc.neural.ops import NumpyOps, CupyOps
 from thinc.neural.optimizers import Adam, SGD
 import random
+import ujson
 
 from .tokenizer import Tokenizer
 from .vocab import Vocab
diff --git a/spacy/util.py b/spacy/util.py
index ba7873640..47abddc43 100644
--- a/spacy/util.py
+++ b/spacy/util.py
@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@ import random
 import msgpack
 import msgpack_numpy
 msgpack_numpy.patch()
+import ujson
 
 from .symbols import ORTH
 from .compat import cupy, CudaStream, path2str, basestring_, input_, unicode_