Southwest Mandarin has become the largest Chinese dialect, which areas have it covered?

Southwest Mandarin, also known as Shangjiang Mandarin, is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese. Southwest Mandarin is mainly distributed in Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hubei and other provinces and cities, in addition to Guangxi, Hunan, Shaanxi, Jiangxi and other provinces and cities and parts of northern Southeast Asia. Southwest Mandarin is divided into 6 pieces and 22 small pieces, which is the most widely distributed and populous dialect area in Mandarin.

The definition of Southwest Mandarin is: Chinese dialects in the southwest and its vicinity are classified into some tones or four tones similar to those in Chengdu, Wuhan, Chongqing, Changde, Guiyang, Kunming and Guilin. However, some small pieces of southwest mandarin are still preserved, such as the small pieces of Minjiang River distributed in the west of Minjiang River valley in Sichuan and Luzhou and Jiangjin in Chongqing (namely' Xishu piece'). Southwest Mandarin has official status in the first special zone of Shan State (Kokang) and the second special zone of Shan State (Wa State) in Myanmar, and it is one of the few dialects with official status. Other dialects with official status include Cantonese (China Special Administrative Region and China Special Administrative Region), Minnan (Taiwan Province Province of China) and Hakka (Taiwan Province Province of China and Suriname). In addition, Ganzhou City and Xinfeng County in Jiangxi Province also have dialect islands of Southwest Mandarin, and the military dialects of southeast Guangdong, Fujian, Hainan and Guangxi are sometimes regarded as a branch of Southwest Mandarin.

Southwest Mandarin is a Mandarin dialect gradually formed from the Ming Dynasty due to the migration to the southwest, and its phonetic system is also the simplest in Mandarin. Apart from the similarities of Mandarin, such as clear voiced sounds and no sharp group opposition, most of Southwest Mandarin is transitional Southern Mandarin. With a population of 270 million, it is the most widely used and populous dialect in Mandarin.

Southwest Mandarin lags behind Beijing Mandarin by one vote. After the founding of New China, at the "National Character Reform Conference" held in 1955, participants had a heated debate on the dialect basis of Putonghua. Finally, the Congress decided to adopt the voting method to select a dialect as the basic dialect of Putonghua from 15 major dialects covering Chinese-speaking areas.

The voting results at that time were: Beijing Mandarin topped the list with 52 votes; Southwest Mandarin (with Southwest Mandarin as the basic dialect and Chengdu pronunciation as the standard pronunciation) won 5 1 vote, and fell to Sun Shan by one vote. The third place is Wu dialect (based on Wu dialect, with Suzhou or Shanghai dialect as the standard pronunciation), with 46 votes; Cantonese (with Cantonese as the basic dialect and Guangzhou pronunciation as the standard) won 25 votes, ranking fourth in the country.