Southwestern Mandarin

Southwestern Mandarin, also called Upper Yangtze Mandarin, is a type of Mandarin Chinese. It is spoken in many parts of Southwestern China. This includes places like Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, and Guizhou, as well as parts of Hubei, Hunan, Guangxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu.

About 260 million people speak Southwestern Mandarin. If we thought of it as its own language, it would be one of the most spoken languages in the world. It would be eighth, after Mandarin Chinese itself, Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic, and Bengali.

Overview

Modern Southwestern Mandarin developed when people moved to the area during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Because this happened not too long ago, this type of Mandarin sounds more like today's standard Mandarin than other Chinese dialects such as Cantonese or Hokkien.

Southwestern Mandarin is spoken in places like Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi. It is also used in Kokang district in northern Myanmar. In the Wa State, Southwestern Mandarin is one of the two official languages, used alongside the Wa language. Some speakers, called the Chin Haw, live in Thailand, and the dialect is also spoken in parts of Northern Vietnam.

Phonology

Tones

Most Southwestern Mandarin dialects, like Standard Mandarin, use only four of the eight tones from old Chinese. In Southwestern dialects, the entering tone usually joins the light-level tone. In Standard Mandarin, it spreads more randomly among the four tones.

Syllables

Southwestern Mandarin dialects do not have the retroflex sounds of Standard Mandarin but share most other sound features. Many dialects cannot tell apart the nasal sound /n/ and the lateral sound /l/, as well as the endings /-n/ and /-ŋ/. For example, the words "la" and "na" sound the same, and so do "fen" and "feng". Some types also cannot tell apart the labiodental /f/ and the glottal /h/.

Subdivisions

Southwestern Mandarin has twelve groups, as shown in the Language Atlas of China. These groups are:

• Cheng–Yu: spoken in Chengdu and Chongqing
• Dianxi: found in western Yunnan
• Qianbei: located in northern Guizhou
• Kun–Gui: covering Kunming and Guiyang
• Guan–Chi: spoken in central Sichuan and part of northern Yunnan
• Ebei: used in northern Hubei
• Wu–Tian: includes Wuhan and Tianmen in Hubei
• Cen–Jiang: found in eastern Guizhou
• Qiannan: located in southern Guizhou
• Xiangnan: covering southern Hunan
• Gui–Liu: spoken in Guilin and Liuzhou in northern Guangxi
• Chang–He: used in northwestern Hunan and southwestern Hubei

Also, the Selibu language mixes Southwestern Mandarin with features from Zhongyuan Mandarin and Alangu Khams.