Province.
New Xiang orange,
Old Xiang yellow,
Chen-Xu Xiang light red.
Xiangnan Tuhua dark green and medium green. Note other dialects are shown in larger areas than in the next map.
Hakka pink, lavender, Southwestern Mandarin light blue, medium blue, light green, and
Waxiang dark blue Since the classification of
Yuan Jiahua (1960), Xiang has been considered one of seven major groups of
varieties of Chinese.
Jerry Norman classified Xiang,
Gan and
Wu as central groups, intermediate between the
Mandarin group to the north and the southern groups,
Min,
Hakka and
Yue. In Xiang languages, the voiced initials of
Middle Chinese yield unaspirated initials in all tone categories. A few varieties have retained voicing in all tones, but most have voiceless initials in some or all tone categories.
Yiyang Yueyang Changsha Yongzhou Quanzhou Jishou Chenxi Hengyang Shaoyang Shuangfeng Zixing Pervasive influence from Mandarin dialects has made Xiang dialects difficult to classify. Yuan Jiahua divided Xiang into
New Xiang, in which voicing has been lost completely, and
Old Xiang varieties, which retain voiced initials in at least some tones. The
Changsha dialect is usually taken as representative of New Xiang, while
Shuangfeng dialect represents Old Xiang. Norman describes the boundary between New Xiang and
Southwestern Mandarin as one of the weakest in China, with considerable similarities between dialects near either side of the boundary, though more distant dialects are mutually unintelligible. Indeed,
Zhou Zhenhe and You Rujie (unlike most authors) classified New Xiang as part of
Southwestern Mandarin. The
Language Atlas of China relabelled the New and Old Xiang groups as Chang-Yi and Lou-Shao respectively, and identified a third subgroup,
Ji-Xu, in some parts of Western Hunan. Bao & Chen (2005) split out part of
Atlas's Chang-Yi subgroup as a new Hengzhou subgroup, and part of Lou-Shao as a Yong-Quan subgroup. They also reclassified parts of the Ji–Xu subgroup as Southwestern Mandarin, renaming the remainder of the subgroup as
Chen-Xu Xiang. Their five subgroups are: ;Chang-Yi :(17.8 million speakers) voiced initials in Middle Chinese become unaspirated voiceless consonant. Most of the dialects retain the
entering tone as a separate category. ;Lou-Shao :(11.5 million speakers) Voiced initials still exist. The entering tone does not exist in most of the dialects. ;
Chen-Xu Xiang :(3.4 million speakers) Some of the voiced consonants are retained. ;
Hengzhou Xiang :(4.3 million speakers) ;
Yong-Quan Xiang :(6.5 million speakers) Voiced consonants still exist. ==Geographic distribution==