Hezhou (Chinese 河州话 ''Hézhōuhuà'') is a creolized
mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole language, creole or pidgin, pidgin language in that ...
spoken in
Gansu Province
Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province.
The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibeta ...
, China. It has been the lingua franca of
Linxia (formerly Hezhou) for several centuries. It is based on Uyghur and perhaps
Salar. It 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 case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal ...
s,
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative langu ...
morphology and an
SOV word order. 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
Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.
It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...
is unusual from a Chinese perspective.
[ It may be that Hezhou tone differs between ethnic Chinese, ]Hui
The Hui people ( zh, c=, p=Huízú, w=Hui2-tsu2, Xiao'erjing: , dng, Хуэйзў, ) are an East Asian ethnoreligious group predominantly composed of Chinese-speaking adherents of Islam. They are distributed throughout China, mainly in the n ...
, Dongxiang and Bao'an speakers, though there is no indication that such differences occur among native speakers.
Hezhou was once thought to be a Chinese language that had undergone heavy Turkic influence with an ongoing loss of tone; it is now believed to be the opposite, with tone acquisition perhaps ongoing.[Mei Lee-Smith (1996) "The Hezhou language", in Wurm et al. (eds) ''Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas,'' pp 865–874.]
History
Hezhou language began to form in the Yuan dynasty
The Yuan dynasty (), officially the Great Yuan (; xng, , , literally "Great Yuan State"), was a Mongol-led imperial dynasty of China and a successor state to the Mongol Empire after its division. It was established by Kublai, the fifth ...
. In that time, a large number of speakers of Mongolian and Turkic languages entered the Hezhou area, and some elements of those languages were mixed with Mandarin Chinese. Studies suggest that Hezhou was also influenced by the Tibetan
Tibetan may mean:
* of, from, or related to Tibet
* Tibetan people, an ethnic group
* Tibetan language:
** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard
** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dial ...
and Monguor Mongour, formerly also known by various names including Tu and Dchiahour, may refer to:
* Monguor people
* Monguor language
The Monguor language (; also written Mongour and Mongor) is a Mongolic language of its Shirongolic branch and is part of ...
languages.
References
{{Languages of China
Chinese-based pidgins and creoles
Mixed languages
Pidgins and creoles
Uyghur language
Tonal languages
Subject–object–verb languages