Hakka Chinese

Hakka is one of the main of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the and descendants in diaspora throughout and Southeast Asia and .

The Hakka language has numerous s or dialects, spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou provinces, including Hainan island and Taiwan. Hakka is not mutually intelligible with , , Minnan and most of the significant spoken variants of the Chinese language.

There is a pronunciation difference between Taiwanese Hakka dialect and Guangdong Hakka dialect. Amongst the dialects of Hakka, the dialect of northeast Guangdong has typically been viewed as a prime example of the Hakka language, forming a sort of standard dialect.

The Guangdong Provincial Education Department created an official romanisation of Meixian Hakka dialect in 1960, one of four languages receiving this status in Guangdong.

''See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more on the dispute whether Hakka and other Chinese linguistic groups should be properly considered languages or dialects.''

Etymology

The name of the Hakka people who are the predominant original native speakers of the language literally means "guest families" or "guest people": ''Hak'' 客 means "guest", and ''ka'' 家 means "family". Amongst themselves, Hakka people variously called their language Hak-ka-fa 客家話, Hak-fa , 客話, Tu-gong-dung-fa 土廣東話, literally, "Native Guangdong language," and Ngai-fa ?話, "My/our language".

History

Early history

The have their origins in several episodes of migration from northern China into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest. The forebears of the Hakka came from present-day Henan and Shaanxi provinces, and brought with them features of Chinese languages spoken in those areas during that time. The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants , as are found in other modern southern Chinese languages, but which have been lost in Mandarin.

Due to the migration of its speakers, the Hakka language may have been influenced by other language areas through which the Hakka-speaking forebears migrated. For instance, common vocabulary are found in Hakka, and Chinese languages.

Some people consider Hakka to have mixed with other languages, such as the language of the , throughout its development.

Linguistic development

A regular pattern of sound change can generally be detected in Hakka, as in most Chinese languages, of the derivation of lexemes from earlier forms of Chinese. Some examples:
*The lexeme represented by the characters 武 or 屋 , pronounced ''mvio'' and ''uk'' in Middle Chinese is ''vu'' and ''vuk'' in Hakka respectively .
*Lexemes corresponding with characters 人 and 日, among others, are pronounced with a ''ng'' consonant in Hakka , and have a corresponding reading in Mandarin as an initial r- consonant.
*The consonant initial of the lexeme corresponding with the character 話 is pronounced ''f'' or ''v'' in Hakka .
*The initial consonant of 學 '''' usually corresponds with a ''h'' approximant in and a voiceless alveo-palatal fricative or velar fricative in Mandarin .

Phonology

Moiyen dialect initials

There are no voiced plosives in Hakka, but it exhibits two sets of voiceless stops, an unaspirated set , and the other aspirated .



* When the initials , , , and , are followed by a , they become , , , and , respectively.

Moiyen rimes

Moiyen Hakka has six vowels, , that are romanised as i, i, ê, a, e, o and u, respectively. The palatisation medial is represented by i and the labialisation medial is represented as u.

Moreover, Hakka s exhibits the final consonants found in Middle Chinese, namely which are romanised as m, n, ng, b, d, and g respectively in the official Moiyen romanisation.

Moiyen tones

The Middle Chinese fully voiced initial characters have become aspirated voiceless initial characters in Hakka. The four Middle Chinese tones Ping, Shang, Qu, Ru have developed in the Moiyen dialect to exhibit a yin-yang splitting in the Ping tone, and a yin-yang splitting in the Ru tone, giving it six tones.



These so called yin-yang tonal splittings developed mainly as a consequence of the type of initial a Chinese character had during the Middle Chinese stage in the development of Chinese languages, with voiceless initial characters tending to become of the yin type, and the voiced initial characters developing into the yang type. In modern Moiyen Hakka however, part of the Yin Ping tone characters have sonorant initials originally from the Middle Chinese Shang tone characters and fully voiced Middle Chinese Qu tone characters, so the voiced/voiceless distinction should be taken only as a rule of thumb.

Hakka tone contours differs more as one moves away from Moiyen. For example the Yin Ping contour is in Changting and in Sixian , Taiwan.

Tone sandhi in Moiyen Hakka

For Moiyen Hakka, the ''yin ping'' and ''qu'' tone characters exhibit sandhi when the following character has a lower pitch. The pitch of the ''yin ping'' tone changes from to when sandhi occurs. Similarly, the ''qu'' tone changes from to under sandhi. These are shown in red in the following table.



The neutral tone occurs in some postfixes used in Hakka. It has a mid pitch.

Other dialects of Hakka

The Hakka language has as many regional dialects as there are counties with Hakka speakers in the majority. Surrounding Meixian are the counties of Pingyuan 平遠, Dabu 大埔, Jiaoling 蕉嶺, Xingning 興寧, Wuhua 五華, and Fengshun 豐順. Each is said to have its own special phonological points of interest. For instance, the Xingning does not have rimes ending in or . These have merged into and ending rimes, respectively. Further away from Meixian, the Hong Kong dialect lacks the medial, so whereas Meixian dialect pronounces the character 光 as , Hong Kong Hakka dialect pronounces it as , 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, as typified by Meixian dialect above. However, there are dialects which have lost all of their Ru Sheng , and the characters originally of this tone class are distributed across the non-Ru tones. Such a dialect is Changting 長汀 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 海 豐 and Lufeng 陸 豐 situated on coastal south eastern Guangdong province. They contain a yin-yang splitting in the Qu tone, giving rise to seven tones in all .

The Hoi-liuk Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from this region. This particular dialect contains , usually not found in other Chinese languages. Taiwan's other main population of Hakka speakers, the Sixian speakers come from Jiaying 嘉應 and surrounding Jiaoling, Pingyuan, Xingning, and Wuhua dialects. Jiaying county later changed its name to Meixian.

Vocabulary

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

Examples of Single Syllable Words

人 person

碗 bowl

狗 dog

牛 cow

屋 house

嘴 mouth

涯 me/I


Example of Multiple-Syllable Words

日頭 sun

月光 moon

屋下/屋家 home

電話 telephone

學堂 school


Hakka prefers the verb 講 when referring to ''speaking'' rather than the Mandarin ''shuo'' 說 .

Hakka uses 食, like Cantonese for the verb "to eat" and 飲 "to drink", unlike Mandarin which prefers ''chi'' 吃 as "to eat" and ''he'' 喝 as “to drink".

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.

Currently the single largest work in Hakka is the ''New Testament and Psalms'' , although that is expected to be surpassed soon by the publication of the ''Old Testament''. These works render Hakka in both romanization and Han characters 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 ''Le Petit Prince'' has also been translated into Hakka , specifically the dialect of Taiwan . This also was dual-script, albeit using the Tongyong Pinyin scheme.