Lower Yangtze Mandarin (traditional Chinese: 下江官話; simplified Chinese: 下江官话; pinyin: Xiàjiāng Guānhuà) is one of the most divergent and least mutually-intelligible of the Mandarin languages, as it neighbours the Wu, Hui, and Gan groups of Sinitic languages.

[3] The Language Atlas of China divides Lower Yangtze Mandarin into three branches:[1][4] There are also small islands of Jianghuai Mandarin (Jūnjiāhuà 軍家話) throughout Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan and Fujian provinces, brought to these areas during the Ming dynasty by soldiers from Jiangsu, Anhui and Henan during the reign of Hongwu Emperor.

The Huizhou dialects, spoken in southern Anhui, share different features with Wu, Gan and Lower Yangtze Mandarin, making them difficult to classify.

One quantitative study from the late 20th century by linguist Chin-Chuan Cheng focused on vocabulary lists, yielding the result that Eastern dialects of Jianghuai cluster with the Xiang and Gan varieties, whilst Northern and Southern Mandarin, despite being supposedly "genetically" related, were not in the original 35-word list.

Large numbers of merchants from Huizhou lived in Yangzhou and effectively were responsible for keeping the town economically afloat.

[13] A characteristic feature of Lower Yangtze Mandarin is the treatment of Middle Chinese syllable-final stops.

Syllables with stop codas (-p, -t and -k) had no phonemic tonal contrast, but were traditionally treated as comprising a fourth category, called the entering tone.

[20] Most Lower Yangtze varieties retain a /ʐ-/ initial, but in central Jiangsu (including Yangzhou) it has merged with /l-/.

[21] The existence of literary and colloquial readings is a notable feature of Lower Yangtze Mandarin.

[23] Jiang-huai, like other dialects of Chinese, has two forms for pronouncing words, the Bai (common, vulgar), and the Wen (literary).

[24] Jianghuai Mandarin was possibly the native tone of the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang and many of his military and civil officials.

[27] The Portuguese Chinese Dictionary (PCD), written by missionaries during the Ming dynasty, categorized several Jianghuai dialects with rounded finals.

A number of words appeared to be derived from Jianghuai Mandarin dialect, such as "pear, jujube, shirt, ax, hoe, joyful, to speak, to bargain, to know, to urinate, to build a house, busy, and not yet.

[31] Although the early Ming dynasty Mandarin/Guanhua was a koine based on the Nanjing dialect, it was not entirely identical, with some non-Jianghuai characteristics being found in it.

Jianghuai Mandarin is currently overtaking Wu as the language variety of multiple counties in Jiangsu.