Talk:Sichuanese dialects

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was no consensus to move the page, per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 13:59, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

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Sichuan dialect → Sichuanese — parallels the article Shanghainese rather than Shanghai dialect —70.131.212.228 21:23, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.

• Oppose for now. See discussion below. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:54, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose. Unlike the non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese (e.g. Minnan, Wu, Cantonese), the Sichuan dialect can be more resolutely termed dialect. — AjaxSmack 02:07, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
• Weak support but if moved, it should probably be "Sichuanese (linguistics)" and Sichuanese made into a dab page since, for example, Google's very first hit for "sichuanese" is about Sichuan cuisinese.[1] and a lot of the GBooks hits are about people from Sichuan. [2] Per AjaxSmack, this is certainly a dialect of Mandarin; on the other hand, everything is a dialect of something. Shanghainese, for example, is itself a dialect of Wu. "-ese" or "-ese (linguistics)" appeals to me personally as being in the spirit of Mair's solution of calling them all "topolects" (or DeFrancis' much uglier solution of "regionalects") regardless of their position in the linguistic hierarchy. cab 12:24, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

While the status of the various forms of Chinese is peculiar, I would a priori prefer to move Shanghainese to agree with this article than the other way around, if consistency is necessary.

Two arguments, with evidence, would move me:

• That "Sichuanese" self-identifies as a language
• That English so refers to it.

Neither has been made. I await evidence. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:54, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

I was told from a Sichuanese that they use words like Hai = Shoes and Gai = Street, that is also found in Cantonese and Hakka. It seems that perhaps Sichuanese got slightly influenced by Cantonese and Hakka OR Sichuanese retain more of Middle Chinese(chinese language spoken during Tang, Sui and Song period) than Standard Mandarin. Cantonese and Hakka dialects are also descendants of Middle Chinese and preserves more of Middle Chinese than Mandarin where mandarin lost the initial (Ng-, H-)and final constants(-t,-p,-m,-k). Examples of initial constants in my Chinese dialect of Taishanese Cantonese: Ngin = Person, Ha = down, Hai = Shoes. Examples of final constants in my Chinese dialect of Taishanese Cantonese: Yit = One, Si Yip = Si Yi region in Guangdong province, Nam = South, Guok(in mandarin it is Guo = country.

Revamping this article

I'm going to be making a little push to see if this article can be brought up to the level of some of the other Chinese dialect pages. Right now it seems to be a mishmash of hearsay and fact. I'm going to be mainly cribbing from the Hanyu Fangyan Gaiyao. Let me know if you'd like to help out. Alexwoods (talk) 01:09, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

substantially identical to Yunnanese?

I really am quite weak at Chinese but that was certainly not my impression, and I also think the similarities to putonghua are overstated.

I aggree. I speak mandarin, but live Chongqing now. I dunno if Chongqing hua is same as sichuan hua, but chongqing hua is definitely a lot different from mandarin, and I know many mandarin speaking chinese who will have a hard time understanding someone speaking pure chongqing/sichuan hua. And reverse. Some words and/or sentences are just totally different and none existent in mandarin, at least to my knowledge. --Stiginshanghai (talk) 15:44, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Question

Since "Though the four tone categories are the same as those of standard Mandarin, the third and fourth tones of the Sichuan dialect are almost exactly the reverse of the standard Mandarin tones." as it is written,I think 雄起 should be Xiong2 Qi4.

Fully sinicized?

Like many of the southern provinces in China, Sichuan was fully sinicized by the end of the Tang Dynasty.

Does the given source really say that? There are plenty of ethnic minorities in modern Sichuan, speaking languages of the Qiangic, Jiarongic, Lolo-Burmese, Naxi, Bodish, Hmongic, even Tai groups. Are they supposed to have immigrated into the area only later? This is what the expression "fully sinicized" implies to me: complete assimilation, linguistic and cultural, of whatever indigenous population there is. Or is that not what is meant? Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:10, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Phonology

If there are no retroflex consonants, why is the name of the dialect in the dialect starting with a retroflex consonant? Seems like it should just be /s/. Thoughts? Yung Wei (talk) 10:08, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

About the History

There are two great immigration wave in Sichuan, the first one is in Ming Dynasty, the second one, which is more famous, is in Qing Dynasty. According to some researches, it is in Ming Dynasty when Modern Sichuanese came into being. I have put a citation there. --本本一世 (talk) 05:39, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Was the first great wave of immigration due to the massacres carried out by Zhang Xianzhong? If so, he should be mentioned in this article. 173.88.246.138 (talk) 22:49, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Population figure citation?

I can't seem to figure out where the number 120 million speakers comes from. Wikipedia shows a population for the province of about 82 million people. Does anyone have a reference? J. Evans —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.109.232.72 (talk) 06:55, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, don't forget the Municipality of Chongqing has a population of 31 million. --本本一世 (talk) 12:24, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Invalid argument and sources, as not all of inhabitance of Sichuan and Chongqing speaks Sichuanese Mandarin, strictly using and combining population census of both region doesn't said anything other than the "people" counts. If you can find sources specifically stating the number of Sichuan Mandarin speakers, then we might have something to conclude here. --LLTimes (talk) 22:27, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

The combination of Sichuanese regions' population is the population of Sichuanese speakers. In fact, Sichuan and Chongqing have 3 local Chinese languages: Sichuanese, Sichuanese Hakka (1 million speakers) and Sichuanese Xiang (0.9 million speakers) and several non-Chinese langguages (less than 3 million speakers). However, all the speaksers of the languages other than Sichuanese in Sichuan and Chongqing can speak Sichuanese accorrding to 《四川方言与巴蜀文化》 and 《移民与四川人“打乡谈”》. And if you have been to Sichuan or Chongqing, you will find that Sichuanese is the lingua franca even in those Qiang or Tibetan counties. I feel it is hard to find accurate number of Sichuanese speakers, and thoese monographs focused on Sichuanese seldom talk about the pupolation. It is often stated like "over 100 million" in books on other subjects. Maybe because the population number is quite obvious.--本本一世 (talk) 12:11, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

That's called Original researching, and i hope you aren't implying otherwise. A proper source showing the exact number of speaker will be better than what you've researched. --LLTimes (talk) 00:05, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

I feel there is kind of risk of falling into "original researching", too. But if you have to draw the line I think it is not, because this is just routine calculations based on reliable sources. Both the numbers themselves and the reason why I could do the calculation is reliable. But anyway I will try to find a direct statement to avoid this kind of conflict. --本本一世 (talk) 02:05, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

I have to agree about those not being valid sources. We could say "somewhere around 100M", but giving a more precise figure is IMO not warranted. (And there are those who would dispute giving any figure based on OR.) — kwami (talk) 21:07, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I propose removing all 3 citations and put it as "~100M" with a "citation needed" next it. --LLTimes (talk) 23:42, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

SW Mandarin = 200M as of 1982, 30% of Mandarin. — kwami (talk) 18:54, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, it is a large proportion of Mandarin speakers. However, that figure fits in southwestern Mandarin more. SW Mandarin also includes much populated provinces such as Guizhou, Yunnan, Hubei and parts of nearby regions. I don't have problems with current figure of ~100M but i do with the "OR" part. --LLTimes (talk) 02:27, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Tone Sandhi

Great improvements to the original article! Can we get some information on Sichuanese tone sandhi in here? It is quite different from Mandarin (3rd tone goes from 53 to 55, etc.) Also, I am pretty sure that the 1st tone is usually a rising 35 rather than a high 55. It changes to 55 in some words depending on the surrounding tones...

Yeah, Chao lists 1st as 45, but does not discuss sandhi. — kwami (talk) 02:28, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Ba-Shu Chinese

How come Ba-Shu Chinese was not mentioned in this article at all? The overlay of a divergent Chinese dialect by Mandarin goes a long way to explain the peculiar nature of Sichuanese, as a Mandarin dialect that is nevertheless very distinctive. I've added an explanation. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:41, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Sichuan has one of the most uniform dialects

This statement is cited to Ramsey, but that book makes no mention of the divergent southern and western dialects covered in this article and Ramsey may not have been aware of them. --JWB (talk) 01:53, 11 November 2011 (UTC)