Could be both. Lots of languages have loan words, and they sometimes drift a long ways from the original meaning

Now I’m wondering if it’s a legit language, I hyperfocused on language theory a while back for a speech synthesis project. There’s hard, testable requirements, and a surprising amount of math to it too.

Like pig Latin is a code, not a language, but crows, dolphins, and orcas have full symbolic languages and regional dialects that you can plot on a language tree

UwU has grammar (maybe stricter than English even, anti patterns are language rules too)

Phonemes that make up the various sounds - check. They have a consistent replacement of certain English ones too, as well as shortening of certain words. Which is pretty consistent for a dialect

The only other thing that comes to mind, probably because it’s so wild to me, is that human language has a consistent speed of information transmission across languages. Languages like Spanish and Japanese have more phonemes per unit of information, and so they’re spoken faster. English, being three languages in a trenchcoat, has more sounds and way more words, so you get the same meaning across with a slower transmission speed by having higher information density.

There’s a standard test you can do, it’d be pretty great if someone published a paper on it