Due to a drastic population decline in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Sichuan implemented the "Guangdong, Guangxi and Sichuan Filling" process. So why doesn't Sichuan speak Cantonese?

The Sichuan region was called the Land of Abundance in ancient times. The land in the Sichuan Basin is very fertile, the rainfall is relatively abundant, and the grain yield is naturally high. When farming was the main means of social production, the population here was naturally relatively dense.

However, because this place is easy to defend and difficult to attack, it has been a battleground for military strategists throughout the ages. In ancient times this place was very vulnerable to war. Especially during the two dynasties of the Yuan Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty, the population here was very sparse due to various massacres.

At the beginning of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the court moved people from Huguang to Sichuan. So why didn’t Sichuan speak Cantonese?

First of all, at the beginning of the Ming and Qing dynasties, an immigration policy of "Huguang Reclamation of Sichuan" was adopted. In fact, it was to move refugees or landless poor farmers from Huguang to Sichuan and other places. , allocate fields and land to them, and allow them to settle down in Sichuan.

The ancient Huguang area refers to the current Lianghu area, that is, Hunan and Hubei. Although the Huguang area is said to have a "Guangzhou", it is actually very different from the Guangdong area. The folk customs of the two areas are very different, and the language characteristics are also different. People in the Huguang area do not speak Cantonese, so even if they arrive in Sichuan, they will not speak Cantonese.

Secondly, most of the people who returned to Sichuan had fled from Sichuan. At the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, a very bloody massacre was held in Sichuan, resulting in the loss of more than 95% of the population in Sichuan. At that time, 50% of the people were killed, and the other 45% fled to various parts of the world.

In the late Ming Dynasty, due to Zhang Xianzhong's separatist regime in Sichuan, massacres occurred in Sichuan, so many refugees fled, and most of them went to the Huguang area, which is relatively close to Sichuan.

When the Ming and Qing dynasties immigrated to the Sichuan area, they also moved the poor farmers in the Huguang area who had no land for farming back to Sichuan. Most of these people were native residents of Sichuan, which was equivalent to bringing the original Sichuan people back to Sichuan. It is normal for the language to remain unchanged after moving back to Sichuan.

The third point is that the languages ????in Huguang and Sichuan are actually relatively close. In fact, the similarity index between the current dialects of Hunan and Hubei and the dialects of Sichuan is quite high. Many words and pronunciations are similar. Very similar.

So even if some residents from the Huguang area moved into Sichuan, they would still be able to speak Sichuan dialect in the atmosphere of Sichuan.

And when the immigrants immigrated back then, it was not that millions of people immigrated at once, but tens of thousands of people immigrated in batches.

The people who went there first will lead the latter to slowly learn to speak Sichuan dialect, so people who later moved to the Sichuan area learned to speak Sichuan dialect.

Finally, Sichuan does not have only one single language family, but multiple language families. The Sichuan dialect we know now is mainly a language form based on Chengdu Mandarin.

Sichuan dialect is also different in different places, and the pronunciation and vocabulary are also different, so we define Sichuan dialect as a single language according to the country.

When people moved to Sichuan, there must have been Cantonese settlements. The way of speaking in these gathering areas of Cantonese descendants is actually somewhat similar to the current Cantonese.

It’s just that due to the overall impact of marketization, the tone and pronunciation have changed a lot, but some words are still the same.

Just as everyone thinks that Henan dialect sounds very friendly, in fact, the Henan dialect that everyone knows is just Mandarin, and the dialects of various regions in Henan are different.