Hezhou

Hezhou (Chinese: 河州话; pinyin: Hézhōuhuà), also known as Linxia (Chinese: 临夏方言; pinyin: Línxià fāngyán), is a creolized mixed language spoken in Gansu Province, China. It has been the lingua franca of Linxia (formerly Hezhou) for several centuries.

Earlier scholars such as Mei Lee-Smith and Stephen A. Wurm, proposed that it is based on Western Yugur and perhaps Salar and has been relexified by Mandarin Chinese, so that nearly all roots are of Chinese origin, but grammatically it remains a Turkic language, with six noun cases, agglutinative morphology and an SOV word order. Under this statement, the language is thought to be originated from a Turkic language and replaced all of its vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese. However, modern linguists argue that Hezhou is fundamentally a Sinitic language that experienced language contact induced change. Dwyer demonstrated that the dialect consistently retains native Sinitic phonological and lexical features while undergoing heavy morphosyntactic interference from neighboring Altaic and Bodic languages. Tetsuya Kawasumi also notes that neither Uyghur nor Western Yugur speaking population inhabited the core Hezhou region. Instead, Kawasumi attributes the dialect change to the language contact during the mid-to-late Qing Dynasty.

Grammatical suffixes are either Turkic or Chinese in origin; in the latter case they have been divorced from their original function and bear little to no relation to Chinese semantics. The phonology is largely Chinese, with three tones, though Hezhou tone sandhi is unusual from a Chinese perspective. It may be that Hezhou tone differs among ethnic Chinese, Hui, Dongxiang and Bao'an speakers, though there is no indication that such differences occur among native speakers.

From Wikipedia · Hezhou language · CC BY-SA 4.0