Native speakers 30 million (2007) | Writing system hanzi, romanization | |
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Native to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, overseas communities Region China: northeastern Guangdong province, adjoining regions of Fujian and Jiangxi provinces; Hong Kong: New Territories Ethnicity Hakka people (Han Chinese) Language family Sino-Tibetan
Sinitic
Chinese
Hakka | ||
Hakka /ˈhækə/, 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.
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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.
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".
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 dating back as far as the end of Western Jin. 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:
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 Haifeng (alternatively known as Hailu). Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from these two regions. Sixian speakers come from Jiaying (嘉應) and surrounding Jiaoling, Pingyuan, Xingning, and Wuhua. Jiaying county later changed its name to Meixian. The Haifeng dialect contains postalveolar consonants ([ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], etc.), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese varieties. Wuhua, Dabu, and Xingning dialects have two sets of fricatives and affricates.
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.