Linguistic Change Caused By Language Contact

Hezhou is the ancient name of Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu Province, and the name derives from the Yellow River. It locates in the central southwest of Gansu, being a multi-ethnic areas since ancient times. Hezhou dialect is used by Han and Hui nationalities in this region, and it is also a linguistic tool for communication between minorities living around.With methods including investigation, illustration and literature study, this essay makes a systematic demonstration on Hezhou dialect’s grammatical phenomenon. On this base, some special grammatical phenomenon is collected to compare with Altaic language, in order to indicate the mixture feature of Hezhou dialect system. Finally, with comprehensive consideration of Hezhou’s history, people, culture and ethic situation as well as application of the linguistic theory like Language Contact, the thesis tried to analyze and explain how the language emerged, thereby confirming it is a mixed language.This essay is divided into five sections.The first section is an introduction, which generally summarizes the analyses of Hezhou dialect in the respect of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and language contact, and briefly states the purpose and method of this paper.The second section is an overview of Hezhou’s historical humanity and language. It mainly i ntroduces Hezhou’s geography, historical evolution, ethnic composition and language profile.The third section is the morphological pattern of Hezhou dialect, which conducts a static description on Hezhou dialect’s morphology regarding Noun, Quantifier, Pronoun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction, Auxiliary Word, Modal Particle and so forth.The forth section is description of syntactic features of Hezhou dialect, which mainly describes Hezhou dialect’s significant word order,□[ξ]construction, Zhe construction, Ba construction and interrogative sentence, accompanying many example sentences for each.The fifth section is Hezhou dialect------the result of Language Contact, comparing Hezhou dialect with the Altaic language and explaining Hezhou dialect system’s mixed feature. On this base, adopting Language Contact theory, this section analyzes and explains how the dialect emerges, thereby confirming it is a mixed language.