The Shaanxi Dialect of Xi'an
The speech you hear around Xi'an is the Guanzhong dialect — a branch of Central Plains Mandarin, not a dialect of standard Mandarin, and not fully mutually intelligible with it. Locals take genuine pride in its Tang-dynasty capital pedigree, though linguistically it's a cousin of Tang court speech rather than a fossil of it. For travelers it's flavor, not a tool: everyone you'll deal with speaks standard Mandarin.
