[1800s] linguistic effects of Brit/Canuck settlement of mainly Chinese area

Alright, I'm going to spare you the details of this because it's a TL not meant for AH.com and flirts with ASB every now and then. Basically there's a Chinese colony far away from the mainland that got sold to the British in the early 18th century. Up until the 1800s, the colony was almost entirely inhabited by Chinese who spoke Mandarin and aborigines.

However, starting in the early 19th century, settlers from the British Isles and British North America started turning up in the colony. Initially in the mostly empty east, but soon began to spread to the west as well, coupled with increasing Chinese settlement of the east. With all this in place, it will inevitably mean regular contact between settlers of European descent and settlers of Chinese descent which could possibly result in both ethnic groups developing dialects due to regular exposure to Mandarin or English.

This is where my question comes in: If this potential new dialect of English does indeed develop, what will it be like in the modern day? How will it sound like in comparison to other English dialects and accents?

It depends on the location. Can you tell us where this place is? Also, I would like a link to this to study the case a bit further, but if that is not permissible, simply knowing where it is would do.

Kingpoleon said:

It depends on the location. Can you tell us where this place is? Also, I would like a link to this to study the case a bit further, but if that is not permissible, simply knowing where it is would do.

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Ignore Alaska. http://i.imgur.com/LHDoJCp.png

Hmmm. It could resemble the Chinese-English mix that we saw on the TV series Firefly. Or for more real world examples, the way English and Hindi (?) have mixed in India, with each borrowing words from the other, or English and French have melted together in the St. John Valley of northern Maine and in the Cajun region of Louisiana. Much of the form would depend on which is the language of the dominant culture -- in Maine frex French words mingle with English in a generally English syntax.

Hmm... I would say China would have split apart from it by 1800, even if only due to Russian pressure. By the 1850s, they would be quite separate dialects, and if Britain gains it then, it would probably merely mix into the dialect. A high population would be expected, and have only a few English loanwords. Of course, changing of the alphabet could happen for simplification. I would expect it to be like Dutch and German in intelligibility by 1900.

Kingpoleon said:

Hmm... I would say China would have split apart from it by 1800, even if only due to Russian pressure. By the 1850s, they would be quite separate dialects, and if Britain gains it then, it would probably merely mix into the dialect. A high population would be expected, and have only a few English loanwords. Of course, changing of the alphabet could happen for simplification. I would expect it to be like Dutch and German in intelligibility by 1900.

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They left it to the British in the early 1700s if it's that's any useful information.

Cash said:

Hmmm. It could resemble the Chinese-English mix that we saw on the TV series Firefly.

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As far as I can tell that was just english with some Chinese swearing

Anyway I think your language could look like "Chinglish". While Chinglish is often just poor or weird translation, it is often based on using English words with Chinese grammar, especially when spoken.

Mandarin in the 18th century lacked the alveolo-palatal consonant series [ʨ]j [ʨʰ]q [ɕ]x and still have them as two separate series [ʦ]z [ʦʰ]c s and [k]g [kʰ]k [x]h, hence we had Tientsin and Kinmen but have Tianjin and Jinmen.

The vowel shift of [ɔ]o hadn't take place as late as the late 19th century, so the colonists would likely not undergo the same shift.

On the other hand, there were more initial consonants in Mandarin that are now merged or lost. They are [v](v-), [ɲ](gn-), and [ŋ](ng-). The latter two may or may not survive contact with English or may even disappear by themselves as OTL Mandarin.

There were (and in some places, are) five tones, they are the four tones of modern Mandarin plus the entering tone, with the final stop consonants lost, leaving only a glottal stop [ʔ]. Their realization, however, may be a mess as IOTL.

The origin of the colonists is important as well. If they have diverse background, then the community would likely emphasize the importance of speaking an unified standard Mandarin in public, and frown upon incorrect pronunciations in public, restricting the spread of changes to private speech. But if most of them came from a single Mandarin dialect area, then changes in idiolects could have an easier time spreading.

What if the different dialects were split between upper and lower classes?

Here in Xinjiang, where the Han and Hui Chinese coexist with various Turkic-speaking communities in the same towns and schools, there's not too much language-mixing. Uyghurs tend to adopt foreign vocabulary from Russian and English first, with Chinese borrowings relegated to personal names, place names (zhongguo, beijing), and food names (jiucai, dapanji, muer, huajiao). There's a couple of modern borrowings (daxue for university, though there's also another loanword based on the English, and hanzu cha for Chinese language) and ancient loanwords (chai for tea, laghman for Chinese laghman).

Local Mandarin has a few local borrowings for foods like piazi for onion instead of standard yangcong, badamu for almond instead of xingren, chamagu for a local turnip-like vegetable Uyghurs call chamghul, nang for naan and narin for the Kazakh and Kyrgyz dish narin. Place names that aren't based on ancient texts are also adapted from local words and same with words for Uyghur musical forms and instruments.

You might also want to look into the Mandarin dialect spoken by ethnic Dungan (Islamic Hui Chinese) communities which have existed in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries for centuries. They are still mutually intelligible with Xinjiang and Gansu Mandarin with a few outdated Qing-era vocabulary words and a few modern borrowings from Russian and Turkic languages. This is also despite the Soviet Union forcing the Dungans to use cyrillic to write their language instead of hanzi.

There's also a native Russian minority in Xinjiang that continues to speak Russian despite isolation from their ancestral homeland. I'm not too sure about their dialect but I imagine they must have quite a few Mandarin and Uyghur borrowed words.