Hakka Chinese

Hakka
客家語 / 客家语 Hak-kâ-fa
Hak-kâ-fa/Hak-kâ-va (Hakka/Kejia) written in Chinese characters
Native to	China, Taiwan, overseas communities
Region	Mainland China: northeastern Guangdong province, adjoining regions of Fujian and Jiangxi provinces; Hong Kong: New Territories (older generations since younger Hakkas mostly speak Cantonese due to language shift and social assimilation)
Ethnicity	Hakka people (Han Chinese)
Native speakers	30 million (2007)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Hakka
Writing system	hanzi, romanization[2]
Official status
Official language in	none (legislative bills have been proposed for it to be one of the "national languages" in the Republic of China)
Recognised minority language in	Taiwan (a statutory language for public transportation;[3] government sponsor of Hakka-language television station)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	hak
Glottolog	hakk1236[4]
Linguasphere	79-AAA-g > 79-AAA-ga (+ 79-AAA-gb transition to 79-AAA-h)

Hakka /ˈhækə/,^[5] also rendered Kejia, is one of the major groups of varieties of Chinese, spoken natively by the Hakka people throughout in southern China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and throughout the diaspora areas of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and in overseas Chinese around the world.

Due to its primary usage in scattered isolated regions where communication is limited to the local area, Hakka has developed numerous varieties or dialects, spoken in different provinces, such as Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Fujian, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangxi and Guizhou, as well as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Hakka is not mutually intelligible with Yue, Wu, Southern Min, Mandarin or other branches of Chinese, and itself contains a few mutually unintellegible varieties. It is most closely related to Gan and is sometimes classified as a variety of Gan, with a few northern Hakka varieties even being partially mutually intellegible with southern Gan. There is also a possibility that the similarities are just a result of shared areal features.^[6]

Taiwan, where Hakka is the native language of a significant minority of the island's residents, is a center for the study and preservation of the language. Pronunciation differences exist between the Taiwanese Hakka dialects and Mainland China's Hakka dialects; even in Taiwan, two major local varieties of Hakka exist.

The Meixian dialect (Moiyen) of northeast Guangdong in China has been taken as the "standard" dialect by the People's Republic of China. The Guangdong Provincial Education Department created an official romanization of Moiyen in 1960, one of four languages receiving this status in Guangdong.

Etymology

The name of the Hakka people who are the predominant original native speakers of the variety literally means "guest families" or "guest people": Hak 客 (Mandarin: kè) means "guest", and ka 家 (Mandarin: jiā) means "family". Among themselves, Hakka people variously called their language Hak-ka-fa (-va) 客家話, Hak-fa (-va), 客話, Tu-gong-dung-fa (-va) 土廣東話, literally "Native Guangdong language", and Ngai-fa (-va) 我話, "My/our language".

History

Early history

It is commonly believed that Hakka people have their origins in several episodes of migration from northern China into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest^[7] dating back as far as the end of Western Jin.^[8] The forebears of the Hakka came from present-day Central Plains provinces of Henan and Shaanxi, and brought with them features of Chinese varieties spoken in those areas during that time. (Since then, the speech in those regions has evolved into dialects of modern Mandarin). The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants -p -t -k, as are found in other modern southern Chinese varieties, but which have been lost in Mandarin.

Due to the migration of its speakers, Hakka may have been influenced by other language areas through which the Hakka-speaking forebears migrated. For instance, common vocabulary is found in Hakka, Min, and the She (Hmong–Mien) languages. In recent times, many She people have become Hakka speakers.

Linguistic development

A regular pattern of sound change can generally be detected in Hakka, as in most Chinese varieties, of the derivation of phonemes from earlier forms of Chinese. Some examples:

• Characters such as 武 (war, martial arts) or 屋 (room, house), are pronounced roughly mwio and uk (mjuX and ʔuwk in Baxter's transcription) in Early Middle Chinese, have an initial v phoneme in Hakka, being vu and vuk in Hakka respectively. Like in Mandarin, labiodentalisation process also changed mj- to a w-like sound in Hakka before grave vowels, while Cantonese retained the original distinction (compare Mandarin 武 wǔ, 屋 wū, Cantonese 武 mou⁵, 屋 uk¹).
• Middle Chinese initial phonemes /ɲ/ (ny in Baxter’s transcription) of the characters 人 and 日, among others, merged with ng- /ŋ/ initials in Hakka (人 ngin, 日 ngit). For comparison, in Mandarin, /ɲ/ became r- (人 rén, 日 rì), while in Cantonese, it merged with initial /j/ (人 yan⁴, 日 yat⁶).
• The initial consonant phoneme exhibited by the character 話 (word, speech; Mandarin huà) is pronounced f or v in Hakka (v does not properly exist as a distinct unit in many Chinese varieties).
• The initial consonant of 學 hɔk usually corresponds with an h [h] approximant in Hakka and a voiceless alveo-palatal fricative (x [ɕ]) in Mandarin.

Phonology

Dialects

Hakka has as many regional dialects as there are counties with Hakka speakers as the majority. Some of these Hakka dialects are not mutually intelligible with each other. Surrounding Meixian are the counties of Pingyuan, Dabu, Jiaoling, Xingning, Wuhua, and Fengshun. Each is said to have its own special phonological points of interest. For instance, Xingning lacks the codas [-m] and [-p]. These have merged into [-n] and [-t], respectively. Further away from Meixian, the Hong Kong dialect lacks the [-u-] medial, so, whereas Meixian pronounces the character 光 as [kwɔŋ˦], Hong Kong Hakka dialect pronounces it as [kɔŋ˧], which is similar to the Hakka spoken in neighbouring Shenzhen.

As much as endings and vowels are important, the tones also vary across the dialects of Hakka. The majority of Hakka dialects have six tones. However, there are dialects which have lost all of their checked tone (Ru Sheng), and the characters originally of this tone class are distributed across the non-Ru tones. Such a dialect is Changting which is situated in the Western Fujian province. Moreover, there is evidence of the retention of an earlier Hakka tone system in the dialects of Haifeng and Lufeng situated on coastal south eastern Guangdong province. They contain a yin-yang splitting in the Qu tone, giving rise to seven tones in all (with yin-yang registers in Ping and Ru tones and a Shang tone).

In Taiwan, there are two main dialects: Sixian and Hailu (alternatively known as Haifeng). Most Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from these two regions. Sixian speakers come from Jiaying Prefecture (Chinese: 嘉應), mainly from the four counties of Chengxiang (now Meixian), Zhengping (now Jiaoling), Xingning and Pingyuan. The Hailu dialect contains postalveolar consonants ([tʃ], [tʃʰ], [ʃ] and [ʒ]), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese varieties. Wuhua, Dabu, and Xingning dialects have two sets of fricatives and affricates.

• Huizhou (Hakka) dialect (惠州客家話)
• Meizhou dialect (梅州客家話)
• Wuhua dialect (五華客家話)
• Xingning dialect (興寧客家話)
• Pingyuan dialect (平遠客家話)
• Jiaoling dialect (蕉嶺客家話)
• Dabu dialect (大埔客家話)
• Fengshun dialect (豐順客家話)
• Longyan dialect (龍岩客家話)
• Lufeng (Hakka) dialect (陸豐客家話)
• Sixian dialect (四縣客家話)

Ethnologue reports the dialects as Yue-Tai (Meixian, Wuhua, Raoping, Taiwan Kejia: Meizhou above), Yuezhong (Central Guangdong), Huizhou, Yuebei (Northern Guangdong), Tingzhou (Min-Ke), Ning-Long (Longnan), Yugui, Tonggu.

Vocabulary

Like other southern Chinese varieties, Hakka retains single syllable words from earlier stages of Chinese; thus a large number of syllables are distinguished by tone and final consonant. This reduces the need for compounding or making words of more than one syllable. However, it is also similar to other Chinese varieties in having words which are made from more than one syllable.

Hakka prefers the verb [kɔŋ˧˩] 講 when referring to saying rather than the Mandarin shuō 說 (Hakka [sɔt˩]).

Hakka uses [sit˥] 食, like Cantonese [sɪk˨] for the verb "to eat" and 飲 [jɐm˧˥] (Hakka [jim˧˩]) for "to drink", unlike Mandarin which prefers chī 吃 (Hakka [kʰiɛt˩]) as "to eat" and hē 喝 (Hakka [hɔt˩]) as "to drink" where the meanings in Hakka are different, to stutter and to be thirsty respectively.

Writing systems

Various dialects of Hakka have been written in a number of Latin orthographies, largely for religious purposes, since at least the mid-19th century.

Previously, the single largest work in Hakka was the New Testament and Psalms (1993, 1138 pp., see The Bible in Chinese: Hakka), but since 2012 that has been surpassed by the publication of the complete Hakka Bible known as the Today's Taiwan Hakka Version and includes the Old Testament along with audio recordings. These works render Hakka in both romanization (pha̍k-fa-sṳ) and Han characters (including ones unique to Hakka) and are based on the dialects of Taiwanese Hakka speakers. The work of Biblical translation is being performed by missionaries of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

The popular The Little Prince has also been translated into Hakka (2000), specifically the Miaoli dialect of Taiwan (itself a variant of the Sixian dialect). This also was dual-script, albeit using the Tongyong Pinyin scheme.

Media

The world's only primarily Hakka-language television channel is Hakka TV in Taiwan, a state-run broadcasting service started in 2003.

See also

• Varieties of Chinese

References

• Branner, David Prager (2000). Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology – the Classification of Miin and Hakka. Trends in Linguistics series, no. 123. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-015831-1. 

Further reading

• Hashimoto, Mantaro J. (2010). The Hakka Dialect: A Linguistic Study of Its Phonology, Syntax and Lexicon. Princeton/Cambridge Studies in Chinese Linguistics. 5. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-13367-X. 
• O'Connor, Kevin A. (1976). "Proto-Hakka". Ajia Afurika gengo bunka kenkyū / Journal of Asia and Africa Studies. 11 (1): 1–64. 
• Sagart, Laurent (1998). "On distinguishing Hakka and non-Hakka dialects". Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 26 (2): 281–302. JSTOR 23756757. 
• ——— (2002). "Gan, Hakka and the Formation of Chinese Dialects" (PDF). In Ho, Dah-an. Dialect Variations in Chinese. Taipei: Academia Sinica. pp. 129–154. 
• Schaank, Simon Hartwich (1897). Het Loeh-foeng-dialect (in Dutch). Leiden: E.J. Brill. Retrieved 11 February 2015. 

External links

Hakka edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Hakka phrasebook.

• Searching for My Hakka Roots
• Classification of Hakka Dialects
• Aspects of Meixian/Moiyen Dialect of Hakka Phonology
• Information about Hakka
• Video with basic hakka sentences as used by the East Timorese Chinese on YouTube
• Chinese to Hakka Character Converter