Southwestern Mandarin

Southwestern Mandarin (Chinese: 西南官话; pinyin: Xīnán Guānhuà), also known as Upper Yangtze Mandarin (Chinese: 上江官话; pinyin: Shàngjiāng Guānhuà), is a Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in much of Southwestern China, including in Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou, most parts of Hubei, the northwestern part of Hunan, the northern part of Guangxi and some southern parts of Shaanxi and Gansu.

Southwestern Mandarin is spoken by roughly 260 million people. If considered a language distinct from central Mandarin, it would be the eighth-most spoken language by native speakers in the world, behind Mandarin itself, Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic and Bengali.

Overview

Modern Southwestern Mandarin was formed by the waves of immigrants brought to the regions during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Because of the comparatively recent move, such dialects show more similarity to modern Standard Mandarin than to other varieties of Chinese like Cantonese or Hokkien. For example, while like other Southern Chinese dialects, Southwestern Mandarin does not possess the distinction of retroflex consonants of Middle Chinese (/ʈ͡ʂ/ ⟨zh⟩, /ʈ͡ʂʰ/ ⟨ch⟩, /ʂ/ ⟨sh⟩, /ɻ/ ⟨r⟩) preserved in Standard Mandarin, most varieties of it also fail to retain the checked tone that many southern dialects have. The Chengdu-Chongqing and Hubei dialects are believed to reflect aspects of the Mandarin lingua franca that was spoken during the Ming. However, some scholars believe its origins may be more similar to Lower Yangtze Mandarin. Though part of the Mandarin group, Southwestern Mandarin has many striking and pronounced differences with Standard Mandarin such that until 1955, it was generally categorized alongside Cantonese and Wu Chinese as a branch of other Chinese varieties.

Southwestern Mandarin is also used between different ethnic minorities in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi.