Ladies and gentlemen, I want to know which branch the dialect in Lingling area belongs to.

It belongs to southwest mandarin, and Hunan is a dialect area except Yongzhou and Xiangxi. Hakka dialect is mainly spoken in Meizhou, Guangdong and parts of Sichuan.

Generally speaking, Yongzhou dialect belongs to the southwest mandarin of northern dialect, but it is a little more difficult to understand than Sichuan dialect, and belongs to a synthesis of southwest mandarin, Hunan dialect and Cantonese.

There is another dialect in rural lengshuitan, which is difficult to understand. It belongs to ancient Xiang dialect, and its grammar and pronunciation are quite different from Yongzhou dialect. Some old people in rural Yongzhou can only speak dialects, but not Yongzhou dialect. Strangely, some villages near lengshuitan can speak dialects and some can't, but many people in Dong 'an can speak dialects with people who speak dialects in lengshuitan.

According to my own understanding, dialect belongs to an old saying and should belong to a common language in Yongzhou before Putonghua. Later, influenced by the immigrants from the north and the language, the present Yongzhou dialect came into being, which gradually played the role of mandarin in the whole Yongzhou area. If they are new immigrants, they can only speak Yongzhou dialect, while the original aborigines can speak both. Nowadays, in many villages, people in the village speak Yongzhou dialect to each other and also to strangers.

I don't know the south of Yongzhou, but I have seen people in Ningyuan and lengshuitan exchange Mandarin. Historically, the south and the north were often not managed by an administrative agency, but were more influenced by Daozhou.

Mandarin is spoken in many places in Hunan, such as Xiangxi, Huaihua, Zhangjiajie, Changde, Yongzhou and Chenzhou. Of course, not all people in these places can speak Mandarin. Generally speaking, the closer to the city, the more people speak Mandarin, and the closer to the mountains, the greater the difference with Mandarin. Ganzhou, Jiangxi is a dialect island. Southwest Mandarin is spoken in the city and Hakka is spoken outside the city. Chenzhou should not be much different.

I am not from Yongzhou. All the above are guesses, but I feel basically the same. The most important thing to understand these is to understand the immigrants and genealogy in history.

Compared with Yongzhou, the aborigines in Nanning spoke Pinghua in history, but influenced by Cantonese businessmen who came to Nanning for business in the past hundred years, Cantonese vernacular gradually became the mainstream. Now when it comes to Nanning, everyone knows that it is vernacular. I don't know that vernacular Chinese has been growing in Nanning for less than 100 years, and Yongzhou dialect should certainly be longer. Now there are more and more people who speak Mandarin in Nanning, and there is a tendency to replace the vernacular.