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Southwestern Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 西南官话traditional Chinese: 西南官話; ), also known as Huguang (湖广), is a branch of Mandarin Chinese spoken widely in southwestern China.
It covers a large geographical area including the Han Chinese area in Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou, and most part of Hubei, southwest of Hunan, north of Guangxi, south of Shaanxi and Gansu.
Also, it has dialect islands in Jiangxi. It can be further divided into 12 sub-dialects: Cheng-Yu (Chengdu and Chongqing), Dian Xi (west Yunnan), Qian Bei (north Guizhou), Kun-Gui (Kunming and Guiyang), Guan-Chi, E Bei (north Hubei), Wu-Tian, Cen-Jiang, Qian Nan (south Guizhou), Xiang Nan (south Hunan), Gui-Liu, Chang-He. The Southwestern Mandarin population is about 200 million, and they make up a third of the entire Mandarin-speaking population.
Despite a heavy accent, the Southwestern Mandarin spoken in Yunnan and Guizhou is very similar to Northern Mandarin with only minor regional differences in grammar and pronunciation. The reason is that many Han Chinese in Yunnan and Guizhou, are descendants of Mandarin speakers from the North China in recent centuries unlike the Cantonese, Hakka and Min who came from North China to settle in South China for many centuries thus having developed their own distinct languages.
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