Did Sichuan dialect lose out to Mandarin or Cantonese by one vote?

Neither.

1. In 1913, the Republic of China held a pronunciation unification conference and decided to promote the national pronunciation nationwide. At that time, Beijing dialect had become the national lingua franca. Therefore, there was no legendary voting, and the participants all agreed that the Beijing pronunciation should be used as the basis and undergo certain modifications before it could become the national pronunciation.

2. The National Pronunciation Unification Committee spent more than a month to decide the pronunciation of the controversial characters with a majority vote. In other words, during the review process, the pronunciation of some characters may be one vote short of approval. , but there is no situation where a certain dialect is one vote short of being designated as the national language.

3. Generally speaking, the national pronunciation established in the early Republic of China was based on the Beijing pronunciation, while absorbing the pronunciation characteristics of other dialects, such as distinguishing the sharp group pronunciation and retaining the entering tone, but the Beijing pronunciation The powers that be don’t buy it. The Jingyin school, which advocates pure use of Beijing dialect, is still very powerful, and many schools even have fights between the Guoyin school and the Jingyin school.

4. In 1924, the official preparatory meeting for the unification of Mandarin in the Republic of China changed its tune and decided to use Beijing pronunciation as the national pronunciation. The Jingyin School won, and the Guoyin School became Lao Guoyin. Since then, Beijing dialect has won the battle between Beijing and Guoguo and has successfully become the official language of the Republic of China.

5. From October 15 to 23, 1955, the National Writing Reform Conference was held in Beijing. Representatives attending the meeting came from all over the country and various central units, totaling 207 people.

6. In order to decide which dialect should become the official language, namely Mandarin, everyone argued and finally decided to vote. The voting results at that time were: Beijing Mandarin ranked first, Southwest Mandarin fell to Sun Shan by one vote, Wu dialect ranked third, and Cantonese ranked fourth, so Beijing dialect became Mandarin.

Extended information:

Mandarin is a modern standard Chinese language that uses Beijing pronunciation as the standard pronunciation, Northern dialect (Mandarin) as the basic dialect, and model modern vernacular works as the grammatical standard. As one of the working languages ??of the United Nations, it has become an important bridge for cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries and the first choice language for foreigners to learn Chinese.

As of 2015, 70% of China's population has the ability to use Mandarin, and there are still about 400 million people who are limited to one-way communication that can only be understood. The "Implementation Plan for the National Common Language Popularization Project" is planned to be completed by 2020 By 2020, the national common language will be basically popularized across the country. Specifically, the national Mandarin penetration rate will reach an average of more than 80%.

The term Mandarin appeared in the late Qing Dynasty. In 1909, the Qing court stipulated that Beijing Mandarin be the national language. During the Republic of China, the pronunciation of Mandarin was formulated many times. After the founding of New China in 1955, the national common language was stipulated as Mandarin. The predecessor of Mandarin is Mandarin in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and earlier it was called Yayan.