Hakka (, , ) forms a language group of

varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of ma ...

, spoken natively by the

Hakka people The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka Han, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestral homes are chiefly in the Hakka-speaking provincial areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhej ...

throughout Southern China and

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

and throughout the diaspora areas of

East Asia East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both Geography, geographical and culture, ethno-cultural terms. The modern State (polity), states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. ...

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainlan ...

and in overseas Chinese communities 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 Variety may refer to: Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats * Variety (radio) * Variety show, in theater and television Films * ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont * ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

s, spoken in different provinces, such as

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

, Guangxi,

Hainan Hainan (, ; ) is the smallest and southernmost province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), consisting of various islands in the South China Sea. , the largest and most populous island in China,The island of Taiwan, which is slightly l ...

Fujian Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its cap ...

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

Hunan Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi ...

Jiangxi Jiangxi (; ; formerly romanized as Kiangsi or Chianghsi) is a landlocked province in the east of the People's Republic of China. Its major cities include Nanchang and Jiujiang. Spanning from the banks of the Yangtze river in the north int ...

and

Guizhou Guizhou (; formerly Kweichow) is a landlocked province in the southwest region of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Guiyang, in the center of the province. Guizhou borders the autonomous region of Guangxi to the ...

, as well as in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

Thailand Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...

and

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. Hakka is not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible with Yue Chinese, Yue, Wu Chinese, Wu, Southern Min, Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin or other branches of Chinese, and itself contains a few mutually unintelligible varieties. It is most closely related to Gan Chinese, Gan and is sometimes classified as a variety of Gan, with a few northern Hakka varieties even being partially mutually intelligible 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

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

who are the predominant original native speakers of the variety literally means "guest families" or "guest people": ''Hak'' (Mandarin: ) means "guest", and ''ka'' (Mandarin: ) means "family". Among themselves, Hakka people variously called their language ''Hak-ka-fa'' (''-va''), ''Hak-fa'' (''-va''), ''Tu-gong-dung-fa'' (''-va''), literally "Native Guangdong language", and ''Ngai-fa'' (''-va''), "My/our language". In Tonggu County,

province, people call their language ''Huai-yuan-fa''.

History

Early history

It is commonly believed that

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 (China), 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 Chinese, Mandarin). The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants , as are found in other modern southern Chinese varieties, but which have been lost in Mandarin. Laurent Sagart (2002) considers Hakka and southern Gan Chinese to be sister dialects that descended from a single common ancestral language (Proto-Southern Gan) spoken in central Jiangxi during the Song Dynasty. In Hakka and southern Gan, Sagart (2002) identifies a non-Chinese substratum that is possibly Hmong-Mien languages, Hmong-Mien, an archaic layer, and a more recent Late Middle Chinese layer. Lexical connections between Hakka, Kra-Dai, and Hmong-Mien have also been suggested by Deng (1999). 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 Chinese, Min, and the She language, She (Hmong–Mien) languages. Today, most She people in Fujian and Zhejiang speak Shehua, which is closely related to Hakka.

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), pronounced roughly ''mwio'' and ''uk'' (''mjuX'' and ''ʔuwk'' in Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese, 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 in Hakka also changed ''mj-'' to a w-like sound before grave vowels, while Cantonese retained the original distinction (compare Mandarin 武 ''wǔ'', 屋 ''wū'', Cantonese 武 ''mou''⁵, 屋 ''uk''¹). * Middle Chinese initial phonemes /ɲ/ (''ny'' in Baxter's transcription) of the characters 人 (person, people) and 日 (sun, day), among others, merged with ''ng-'' /ŋ/ initials in Hakka (人 ''ngin'', 日 ''ngit''). For comparison, in Mandarin, /ɲ/ became ''r-'' /ɻ/ (人 ''rén'', 日 ''rì''), while in Cantonese, it merged with initial ''y-'' /j/ (人 ''yan''⁴, 日 ''yat''⁶). * 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 ' 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. Mei County, Guangdong, Meixian is surrounded by the counties of Pingyuan County, Guangdong, Pingyuan, Dabu County, Dabu, Jiaoling, Xingning, Guangdong, Xingning, Wuhua County, Wuhua, and Fengshun. Each county has its own special phonological points of interest. For instance, Xingning lacks the codas and . These have merged into and , respectively. Further away from Meixian, the Hong Kong dialect lacks the medial, so whereas the Meixian dialect pronounces the character 光 as , the Hong Kong Hakka dialect pronounces it as , which is similar to the Hakka spoken in neighbouring Shenzhen. 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 tones (''rusheng''), and the characters originally of this tone class are distributed across the non-''ru'' tones. An example of such a dialect is Changting County, Changting, which is situated in Western Fujian province. Moreover, there is evidence of the retention of an earlier Hakka tone system in the dialects of Haifeng and Lufeng, Guangdong, Lufeng, situated in coastal southeastern

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

, there are two main dialects: Sixian and Hailu (alternatively known as Haifeng; Hailu refers to Haifeng County and Lufeng, Guangdong, Lufeng County). Most Hakka speakers in Taiwan can trace their ancestry to these two regions. Sixian speakers come from Jiaying Prefecture, mainly from the four counties of Chengxiang (now Meixian District), Zhengping (now Jiaoling), Xingning, Guangdong, Xingning and Pingyuan County, Guangdong, Pingyuan. Most dialects of Taiwanese Hakka, except Sixian and Dabu, preserved postalveolar consonants (, , and ), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese varieties. *Huizhou dialect (not to be confused with Huizhou Chinese) *Meixian dialect (otherwise known as Meizhou) *Wuhua dialect *Xingning dialect *Pingyuan dialect *Jiaoling dialect *Dabu dialect *Fengshun dialect *Hailu dialect *Sixian dialect *Raoping dialect (a.k.a. Shangrao) *Zhaoan dialect ''Ethnologue'' reports the dialects of Hakka as being ''Yue-Tai'' (Meixian, Wuhua, Raoping, Taiwan Kejia: Meizhou above), ''Yuezhong ''(Central Guangdong), ''Huizhou, Yuebei'' (Northern Guangdong), ''Tingzhou'' (Min-Ke), ''Ning-Long'' (Longnan), ''Yugui,'' and ''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, as well as numerous other Chinese varieties such as Min and Cantonese, prefers the verb when referring to ''saying'' rather than the Mandarin (Hakka ). Hakka uses , like Cantonese for the verb "to eat" and (Hakka ) for "to drink", unlike Mandarin which prefers (Hakka ) as "to eat" and ''hē'' (Hakka ) as "to drink" where the meanings in Hakka are different, ''to stutter'' and ''to be thirsty'' respectively.

Writing systems

Chinese script

Hakka Chinese is typically written using Chinese characters (, ''Hàn-jī'').

Latin script

Various dialects of Hakka such as Taiwanese Hakka, is sometimes written in the Latin script or Pha̍k-fa-sṳ. Dialects of Hakka have been written in a number of Latin orthographies, largely for religious purposes, since at least the mid-19th century. The popular ''The Little Prince'' has also been translated into Hakka (2000), specifically the Miaoli County, Miaoli dialect of Taiwan (itself a variant of the Sixian dialect). This also was dual-script, albeit using the Tongyong Pinyin scheme.

Media

Hakka TV is a state-run, primarily Hakka-language television channel in Taiwan that started in 2003. In mainland China, Meizhou Televisions's Hakka Public Channel () has broadcasts 24 hours a day in Hakka since 2006.