Hezhou language

Mixed language spoken in China

Hezhou, also known as Linxia, is a creolized mixed language spoken in Gansu Province, China. It has been the lingua franca of Linxia 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 cases, agglutinative 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 is unusual from a Chinese perspective. It may be that Hezhou tone differs between ethnic Chinese, Hui, Dongxiang and Bao'an speakers, though there is no indication that such differences occur among native speakers.

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