@chu @atomicpoet @mayintoronto Somewhat off-topic side note: On the “whether something is a language” question, I can dust off my old linguistics degree and say how linguists think of it: It’s a language if a community speaks it, it has a regular grammar and it’s fully expressive. That last part means that you can use it to talk about anything you might want to talk about, not just specific domains.
When two cultures first collide, traders will develop a ‘pidgin’, using words from both source languages. Pidgins are not languages, but are useful to communicate for trade purposes. Over time, the next generations of these people may deepen, extend, and regularize the pidgin to become a fully expressive language. This new language-with-two-parents is called a Creole.
I have no idea if Chinglish is an actual Creole, or if it’s just like my French Canadian relatives randomly inserting English nouns into their speech because they are fluent in both languages, but maybe this description can help those of you who speak it to decide.
[Apologies if I’m being a Reply Guy — I just find this stuff really interesting]