Southwestern Mandarin in the context of "Richmond Hill, Ontario"

Chinese (spoken: simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, written: 中文; Zhōngwén) is an umbrella term for Sinitic languages in the Sino-Tibetan language family, widely recognized as a group of language varieties, spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak one of the Chinese languages as their first language.

The Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Chinese government considers the spoken varieties of the Chinese languages dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are considered to be separate languages in a family by linguists. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g., Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g., Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g., Cantonese). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g., Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan. All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic.

Mandarin (/ˈmændərɪn/ MAN-dər-in; simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas.

Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin varieties are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; lit. 'northern speech').

New Xiang, also known as Chang-Yi (simplified Chinese: 长益片; traditional Chinese: 長益片; pinyin: Chǎng Yì piàn; lit. 'Changsha and Yiyang subgroup') is the dominant form of Xiang Chinese. It is spoken in northeastern areas of Hunan, China adjacent to areas where Southwestern Mandarin and Gan are spoken. Under their influence, it has lost some of the conservative phonological characteristics that distinguish Old Xiang. While most linguists follow Yuan Jiahua in describing New Xiang as a subgroup of Xiang Chinese, Zhou Zhenhe and You Rujie classify it as Southwestern Mandarin. However, New Xiang is still very difficult for Mandarin speakers to understand, particularly the old style of New Xiang.

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 each other. 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.

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.

Old Xiang, also known as Lou-Shao (simplified Chinese: 娄邵片; traditional Chinese: 婁邵片; pinyin: Lóu Shào piàn; lit. 'Loudi and Shaoshan subgroup'), is a conservative Xiang Chinese language. It is spoken in the central areas of Hunan where it has been to some extent isolated from the neighboring Chinese languages, Southwestern Mandarin and Gan languages, and it retains the voiced plosives of Middle Chinese, which are otherwise only preserved in Wu languages like Shanghainese. See Shuangfeng dialect for details. Mao Zedong was a speaker of Old Xiang with his native Shaoshan dialect.

Chengdu-Chongqing dialect or Cheng–Yu (Chinese: 成渝; pinyin: Chéng-Yú; Sichuanese Pinyin: Cenyu, locally [tsʰən˨˩y˨˩]) is the most widely used branch of Southwestern Mandarin, with about 90 million speakers. It is named after Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan, and Chongqing, which was under the administration of the province of Sichuan from 1954 to 1997. It is spoken mainly in northern and eastern Sichuan, the northeastern part of the Chengdu Plain, several cities or counties in southwestern Sichuan (Panzhihua, Dechang, Yanyuan, Huili and Ningnan), southern Shaanxi and western Hubei.

This uniform dialect is formed after the great migration movement in Ming and Qing dynasty, and is greatly influenced by the Chinese varieties of Mandarin the immigrants spoke from Hubei, Xiang and Gan. So it keeps fewer characteristics of Sichuan's original Ba-Shu Chinese than other Sichuanese dialects, such as Minjiang dialect.

The Minjiang dialect (simplified Chinese: 岷江话; traditional Chinese: 岷江話, locally [min˨˩tɕiaŋ˥xa˨˨˦]; pinyin: Mínjiānghuà) is a possible Sichuanese dialect spoken mainly in the Min River (Mínjiāng) valley or along the Yangtze in the southern and western parts of the Sichuan Basin in China. There is also a language island of the Minjiang dialect located in the center of the Sichuan Basin covering several counties, including all of Xichong, Yanting, and Shehong Counties, and part of Jiange, Cangxi, Nanbu, Langzhong and Bazhong. The Minjiang dialect is also referred to as the Nanlu dialect by some scholars.

The primary characteristic of the Minjiang dialect is that 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 retain a following glottal stop. It also keeps many characteristics of Ba–Shu Chinese phonology and vocabulary. Due to these characteristics, the status of the Minjiang dialect is disputed among linguists, with some classifying it as Southwestern Mandarin, and others setting it apart as a continuation of Ba–Shu Chinese, the native language of Sichuan before the end of the Yuan dynasty.