Xīnxiāng

New Xiang, or Chang-Yi, is the northern and eastern branch of the Xiang languages, centred on Changsha on the lower Xiang River. Xiang speech descends from the Nanchu dialect formed when Chu migrants settled among the Ba, Nanman and Baiyue peoples of Hunan in the Warring States period; the Han scholar Yang Xiong recorded this Southern Chu speech in his Fangyan.

Northern migrants under the Tang brought Middle Chinese forms, and after the Mongol conquest of the Song in the thirteenth century devastated Hunan, large numbers of Jiangxi settlers arrived under the Ming after 1368, bringing Gan influence.

In the speech of Changsha and the eastern lowlands this contact effaced the voiced initials of Middle Chinese, marking New Xiang off from the older dialects of the interior, which retained them.