The influence of Chinese on Tsat, an Austronesian language of Hainan
Graham Thurgood and Fengxiang Li

   Tsat is an Austronesian language located on Hainan Island. The 1982 census lists 4131 Utsat people largely in the villages of Huihui and Huixin near Sanya on Hainan Island (which has recently been designated as a province), 3849 of whom still speak Tsat. Virtually all the Tsat speakers also speak one or more Chinese dialects, typically Fukienese or Cantonese, the languages of business, and Mandarin, the language of school.
   Genetically the closest language to Tsat is the Northern Roglai of Vietnam, a Chamic language (Austronesian) which it split off from first around 982, with a second migration probably around 1471. Despite the genetic closeness, Tsat is now radically different both phonologically and syntactically from N. Roglai. Phonologically, Northern Roglai is sesquisyllabic and atonal whereas Tsat is monosyllabic and fully tonal. Structurally, Northern Roglai is much, much more like the other Chamic languages of Vietnam which, in turn resemble the Mon-Khmer languages of the region, while Tsat, not surprisingly, is much like the Chinese dialects that surround it. Increasingly, all that remains of Tsat is the vocabulary, with the structure being Chinese, albeit with Tsat lexical items. Thus Tsat provides some exceptionally clear examples of contact-induced syntactic variation and change. Work has been done on genetic affiliations of Tsat (Benedict 1941), the history of the Chamic languages including Tsat (e.g. Thurgood 1999, 1996), and on the description of Tsat itself, Ouyang and Zheng (1983), Zheng (1986, 1997), with the later work by Zheng including numerous valuable observations on the influence of Chinese on Tsat, both identifying Chinese borrowings and commenting on Chinese structural influence.

Tsat contact
   Changes in Tsat resulting from contact with neighboring languages of Hainan are quite obvious. Phonologically, it has gone from sesquisyllabic and registral to monosyllabic and tonal. Lexically, it contains four layers of borrowings reflecting contact patterns since the Tsat arrival in Hainan: a Hlai (= Li) strata, an early Chinese level reflecting early contact with speakers of Min dialects such as Hainanese and various Cantonese dialects, a later layer of contact with the Mandarin spoken by the army and officials, and most recently the Mandarin of the schools. The intensity of the last layer of contact looks to have initiated rapid and through restructuring of the language.
   Comments will be made on contact-induced variation in the phonology, but the focus will be on the syntax. Here we will restrict our detailed examination to four constructions with extant variation, two involving word orders that do not correlate with VO order (Dryer 1992) and two involving word orders that do correlate: genitive constructions, demonstratives and head nouns, adjectives and head nouns, and comparative constructions. All show the structural influence of Chinese. In addition, comments will be made on other constructions borrowed from Chinese, including prehead relative clauses in Tsat, a language that is SVO, and including a number of related grammatical borrowings.