Hezhou (Chinese: 河州话; pinyin: Hézhōuhuà), also known as Linxia (Chinese: 临夏方言; pinyin: Línxià fāngyán),[1] is a creolized mixed language spoken in Gansu Province, China.
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.
[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.
Studies suggest that Hezhou was also influenced by the Tibetan and Monguor languages.
[5] Starting in the late 1970s, linguists began to research the Hezhou language.