Sichuanese Mandarin - History

History

Like many of the southern provinces in China, Sichuan was fully sinicized by the end of the Tang Dynasty. Sichuan has one of the most uniform dialects in all of Inner China, evidence that the variety of Chinese spoken there formed relatively recently. In the thirteenth century, the population of Sichuan dropped precipitously, suspected to be due in part to a series of plagues and Mongol invasions. The population did not recover until it was replenished by subsequent migrations from Hubei, as well as Xiang-speakers, Gan-speakers and Hakka-speakers in the following centuries. These varieties largely supplanted the earlier varieties of Chinese in Sichuan, known as Ba-Shu Chinese or Old Sichuanese. Like Min Chinese, Ba-Shu Chinese was different from the Middle Chinese of the Sui, Tang and Song Dynasties, but instead a divergent dialect group independently descended from the Old Chinese of the Han Dynasty, which formed a substratum that influenced the formation of the modern dialect group and helps to explain the distinctivity of Modern Sichuanese within the Mandarin dialect continuum.