Sichuanese, also called Sichuanese Mandarin, is a branch of Southwestern Mandarin spoken mainly in Sichuan and Chongqing, which was part of Sichuan Province from 1954 until 1997, and the adjacent regions of their neighboring provinces, such as Hubei, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan and Shaanxi. Although "Sichuanese" is often synonymous with the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, there is still a great amount of diversity among the Sichuanese dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible with one another and with other Mandarin varieties. In addition, because Sichuanese is the lingua franca in Sichuan, Chongqing and part of Tibet, it is also used by many Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other ethnic minority groups as a second language.田畅（2009-07-29），《在四川灾区支教的300多个日夜》，鞍山日报
Sichuanese is more similar to Standard Chinese than southeastern Chinese varieties but is still quite divergent in phonology, vocabulary, and even grammar. The Minjiang dialect is especially difficult for speakers of other Mandarin dialects to understand. Sichuanese can be further divided into a number of dialects: Chengdu–Chongqing, Minjiang, Renshou–Fushun, and Ya'an–Shimian. The dialect of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and an important central city, is the most representative dialect of Southwestern Mandarin and is used widely in Sichuan opera and other art forms of the region.
Modern Sichuanese evolved due to a great wave of immigration during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644): many immigrants, mainly from Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong, flooded into Sichuan bringing their languages with them.彭金祥（March 2006），《四川方音在宋代以后的发展》，乐山师范学院学报 The influence of Sichuanese has resulted in a distinct form of Standard Chinese that is often confused with "real" Sichuanese. Sichuanese, spoken by about 120 million people, would rank tenth among languages by number of speakers (just behind Japanese) if counted as a separate language.
Geographic distribution and dialects Sichuanese is mainly spoken in and around the Sichuan Basin, which includes almost all of Sichuan Province and Chongqing Municipality except for some Tibetan- and Yi-inhabited areas. It is also spoken in the border regions of Sichuan's neighboring provinces: northern Yunnan and Guizhou, southern Shaanxi and western Hubei.
However, it is possible to divide Sichuanese into four sub-dialects according to the preservation or distribution of the Middle Chinese checked tone: the Minjiang dialect (), which preserves the checked tone; the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect (), in which the checked tone has merged into the light level tone; the Renshou-Fushun dialect (), which merges the checked tone into the departing tone; and the Ya'an–Shimian dialect (), in which the checked tone is merged into the dark level tone.
The Minjiang, Ya'an–Shimian, and Renshou–Fushun dialects are spoken mainly in South and West Sichuan, regions whose inhabitants have significantly more indigenous Sichuanese descent than those of North and East Sichuan. Thus, these dialects are often referred as Old Sichuanese, as the preserve many characteristics of Bashu, the extinct language formerly spoken by the first Sichuanese Han Chinese people. The Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, named after the two largest cities in greater Sichuan, are spoken in a contiguous area mainly in North and East Sichuan. It is often referred as New Sichuanese because it exhibits fewer characteristics of the Bashu language.
Name Characteristics Spoken areasChengdu–Chongqing dialectentering tone distributed into light level toneNorth and East Sichuan, the northeastern part of Chengdu Plain, several cities or counties in southwestern Sichuan (Panzhihua, Dechang, Yanyuan, Huili and Ningnan), Southern Shaanxi and Western HubeiMinjiang dialectentering tone preserved44 cities or counties in Minjiang River valley or along the Yangtze River in South and West Sichuan, Xichang, Xichong, Yanting, Shehong, northern Yunnan and northern GuizhouRenshou–Fushun dialectentering tone distributed into departing tone8 cities or counties in Tuo River valley (Renshou, Jingyan, Weiyuan, Zigong, Rongxian, Fushun, Neijiang and Longchang), Junlian and MianningYa'an–Shimian dialectentering tone distributed into dark level toneYa'an (prefecture-level city) in West Sichuan
History
Like many of the southern provinces in China, Sichuan was fully sinicized by the end of the Tang dynasty. The modern variety of Chinese spoken in the region formed relatively recently. In the thirteenth century, the population of Sichuan dropped precipitously, suspected to be due in part to a series of plagues and Mongol invasions. The population did not recover until it was replenished by subsequent migrations from Hubei, as well as Xiang-, Gan- and Hakka-speakers in the following centuries. These varieties largely supplanted the earlier varieties of Chinese in Sichuan, known as Ba–Shu Chinese or Old Sichuanese. Like Min Chinese, Ba-Shu Chinese was different from the Middle Chinese of the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties but was instead a divergent dialect group independently descended from the Old Chinese of the Han dynasty, which formed a substratum that influenced the formation of the modern dialect group. That helps to explain the distinctiveness of Modern Sichuanese within the Mandarin dialect continuum.
Phonology
Tones There are five phonemic tones in Sichuanese: dark level tone, light level tone, rising tone, departing tone and entering tone (or checked tone). In some regions the checked tone of Sichuanese has been merged into another tone, which is very different from standard Mandarin, whose checked tone has been merged irregularly into the other four tones. According to Phonology of Sichuan dialect (), among all the 150 Sichuanese-speaking cities and counties, 48 keep the checked tone while the other 102 have only four tones.甄尚灵等（March 1960），《四川方言音系》，四川大学学报（社会科学版） Particularly, in some sub-dialects of the Minjiang dialect (such as the Yingjing dialect), the departing tone has developed into two different tones: a colloquial tone (which is similar to the second tone as a characteristic of Ba-Shu: ) and a literary tone (which is the same as the Chengdu dialect).易杰（2010），《川西大邑等七县市方言音系调查研究》，四川师范大学
The tone contours of the Sichuanese dialects are highly and quite different from those of Beijing Mandarin. In Sichuanese, the first tone (dark level tone) is a high level tone (like Beijing), the second tone (light level tone) is a low falling tone (the mirror image of Beijing), the third tone (rising tone) is a high falling tone and the fourth tone (departing tone) is a low or mid rising tone (interchanged compared to Beijing) and the fifth tone (entering tone) is mid or high if it is not merged, as shown in the chart below.
Sub-dialects 1st tone 2nd tone 3rd tone 4th tone 5th tone Chengdu 55 45Li, Rong. Chengdu Dialect Dictionary. 1998 21 53 213 merged into the 2nd Chongqing 55 21 42 214 merged into the 2nd Leshan 55 21 52 224 3 (checked) Yingjing 45 121 53 11 (colloquial) 213 (literary) 33 Luzhou 55 21 42 13 33 Ya'an 55 21 42 14 merged into the 1st Zigong 55 31 53 24 merged into the 4th
In the areas which keep the entering tone, the five tones of Sichuanese are nearly identical to the values of 5 of the 6 tones of the indigenous Southern Qiang language.
Tone Sandhi Tone sandhi is common in Sichuanese, though the specifics differ between areas. For the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, generally tone sandhi is split into 4 categories.
The first type involves reduplicated words: generally, if the constituent characters have a light level tone (2nd tone) or departing tone (4th tone), the second character changes to the dark level tone (1st tone). Examples: (, , , ). If the constituent characters have a rising tone (3rd tone), the second character changes to the light level tone. Examples:(, ).
The second type involves words ending in (i.e. Erization). If there is one character before the and it has the 2nd tone, the character changes to the 1st tone. Examples: (, ). If there is a two-character compound before the , the character before the changes into the 1st tone. Examples: (, ).
The third type involves specific characters. For example, function word characters like , , , change into the 1st tone in most of the cases. Examples: (, , , [11).
The fourth type involves two-character compounds and three-character compounds. In many cases, the 2nd character's tone changes into the 1st tone. Examples: (, , , , ).
Initials Initials (or syllable onsets) are initial consonants of possible syllables. There are 21 initials in the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese (academically referred as Standard Sichuanese). Four Sichuanese initial consonants do not exist in Beijing: and . On the other hand, five initials in Beijing do not exist in Sichuanese: and .
The following is the initial consonant inventory of Sichuanese, transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and under every IPA symbol in the inventory below there is the transcription of that sound in Sichuanese Pinyin and a Chinese character using that initial:
Labial Coronal Alveolo-palatalVelarPlosive plain b 贝d 得 g 古 aspirated p 配t 套 k 可Affricate plain z 早 j 价 aspirated c 草 q 巧 Nasal m 没 n 路 ȵ 你 ng 我Fricative Voiceless f 发 s 是 x 小 h 好 Voiced v 五 r 如 Zero儿
Finals A final, the remainder of syllable after the initial, consists of an optional medial glide, a vowel and an optional final consonants. There are 36 finals in the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese. Four Sichuanese finals do not exist in Beijing: , , , and . On the other hand, three Beijing finals do not exist in Sichuanese: , , and .
The following is the inventory of Sichuanese finals, transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and under every IPA symbol in the inventory below there is the standard orthography of that sound in Sichuanese Pinyin and a Chinese character using that final:
-Ø -i or -u nasal finals Ø- i 日 er 二 a 大 o 我 e 黑 ai 街 ei 批 ao 包 ou 走 an 烦There's a trend in Chengdu dialect that will replace en 樱 ang 帮 ong 亩 i- i 一 ia 牙 ie 叶 iai 介 iao 标 iu 九 ian 变 in 兵 iang 量 u- u 五 ua 瓜 ue 国 uai 乖 ui 类 uan 段 un 春 uang 光 y- ü 鱼 üo 药 üe 绝 üan 鲜 ün 泳 iong 蓉
Tense vowels for checked tone There is a discrepancy between Old Sichuanese and New Sichuanese in terms of finals. In the "old" Minjiang dialect, the stop consonants for checked-tone syllables in Middle Chinese have developed into tense vowels to create a phonemic contrast, and in several cities and counties the tense vowels are followed by a glottal stop to emphasize the contrast. Meanwhile, the checked tone has disappeared in other Sichuanese dialects.余江（May 2004），《四川官话雅棉小片入声归阴平研究》，汕头大学 The following table shows the tense vowels of Minjiang dialect's three sub-dialects, spoken in Luzhou, Qionglai and Leshan, and a comparison with other Sichuanese dialects is also presented.
example Minjiang Ya'an–Shimian Chengdu-Chongqing Renshou–Fushun Luzhou Qionglai Leshan Luding ChengduChongqing Zigong 搭 [a] 说 [o] 黑 踢 [i] 出 [u] 欲 [yu] 湿 掐 [ia] 刮 [ua] 铁 获 阅 药
Literary and colloquial readings The existence of literary and colloquial readings (), is a notable feature in Sichuanese and some other Sinitic varieties, such as Cantonese or Hokkien. In Sichuanese, colloquial readings tend to resemble Ba-Shu Chinese (Old Sichuanese) or Southern Old Mandarin, while literary readings tend to resemble modern standard Mandarin. For example, in the Yaoling dialect (), the colloquial reading of "" (means "things") is ,杨升初（1985年S2期），《剑阁摇铃话音系记略》，湘潭大学社会科学学报. which is very similar to its pronunciation of Ba-Shu Chinese in the Song dynasty (960–1279).王庆（April 2010），《四川方言中没、术、物的演变》，西华大学学报（哲学社会科学版） Meanwhile, its literary reading, , is relatively similar to the standard Mandarin pronunciation . The table below shows some examples of Chinese characters with both literary and colloquial readings in Sichuanese.甄尚灵（January 1958），《成都语音的初步研究》，四川大学学报（哲学社会科学版）