| Hezhou | |
|---|---|
| Native to | China |
| Region | Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture (approximating the former Hezhou Prefecture),Gansu Province |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | hezh1244 |
Hezhou (Chinese:河州话;pinyin:Hézhōuhuà), also known asLinxia (Chinese:临夏方言;pinyin:Línxià fāngyán),[1] is a creolizedmixed language spoken inGansu Province, China. It has been the lingua franca ofLinxia (formerly Hezhou) for several centuries. It is based on Uyghur and perhapsSalar. It has beenrelexified by Mandarin Chinese, so that nearly all roots are of Chinese origin, but grammatically it remains a Turkic language, with sixnoun cases,agglutinative morphology and anSOV 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 Hezhoutone sandhi is unusual from a Chinese perspective.[2] It may be that Hezhou tone differs among ethnic Chinese,Hui,Dongxiang andBao'an speakers, though there is no indication that such differences occur among native speakers.[3]
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.[2]
Hezhou language began to form in theYuan dynasty.[4] At 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 theTibetan andMonguor languages.[5]
Starting in the late 1970s, linguists began to research the Hezhou language. It is unknown if the language was studied before that.