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'Hakka' is a spoken variation of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the Hakka ethnic group and descendants in diaspora throughout East and Southeast Asia and around the world.
The Hakka language has numerous variants or dialects, spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou provinces, including Hainan island and Taiwan. Hakka is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, Cantonese, 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 Moi-yen/Moi-yan (梅縣, Pinyin: Méixìan) 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.''

Contents

Etymology

History

Early history

Linguistic development

Phonology

Moiyen dialect initials

Moiyen rimes

Moiyen tones

Tone sandhi in Moiyen Hakka

Other dialects of Hakka

Vocabulary

Writing systems

References

External links

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 (Mandarin: kè) means "guest", and ''ka'' 家 (Mandarin: jīa) means "family". Amongst 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) 𠊎話, "My/our language".

History

Early history

The Hakka people have their origins in several episodes of migration from northern China into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest. The forebearers 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. (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 , as are found in other modern southern Chinese languages, but these 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, Min and Cantonese Chinese languages.
Some people consider Hakka to have mixed with other languages, such as the language of the She people, 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 (war, martial arts) or 屋 (room, house), pronounced ''mvio'' and ''uk'' in Middle Chinese is ''vu'' and ''vuk'' in Hakka respectively ( Mandarin: ''wu'').

★ Lexemes corresponding with characters 人 and 日, among others, are pronounced with a ''ng'' consonant in Hakka (人:ngin, 日:ngit), and have a corresponding reading in Mandarin as an initial 'r-' consonant.

★ The consonant initial of the lexeme corresponding with the character 話 (word, speech; Mandarin ''hua'') is pronounced ''f'' or ''v'' in Hakka (''v'' does not properly exist as a distinct unit in many Chinese languages).

★ The initial consonant of 學 '', usually corresponds with an ''h'' consonant in Cantonese and an unvoiced palatal (''x[ɕ]'') or velar (''h[x]'') 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 ().

	IPA/Rom	Labials	Dentals/Apicals	Sibilants	Palatals	Velars	Laryngeals
Voiceless Unaspirated Stops	IPA
	Rom	b	d	z / j(i)		g
Voiceless Aspirated Stops	IPA
	Rom	p	t	c / q(i)		k
Nasals	IPA
	Rom	m	n		ng(i)	ng
Fricatives	IPA
	Rom	f		s / x(i)			h
Liquids	IPA
	Rom	v	l		(y)

When the initials and are followed by a palatised medial, 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 rimes 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.

	vowel	medial + vowel
Syllabics							ŋ

Moiyen tones

The Middle Chinese fully voiced initial characters have become aspirated unvoiced 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.

Tone name	Yin Ping	Yang Ping	Shang	Qu	Yin Ru	Yang Ru
Tone contour	44	11	31	53	1	5
Tone	1	2	3	4	5	6

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 unvoiced 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/unvoiced 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 given as 33 in Changting (长汀) and 24 in Sixian (四县), Taiwan.

Tone sandhi in Moiyen Hakka

For Moiyen Hakka, the ''yin ping'' and ''qu'' tone characters exhibit sandhi when the following character is of a lower pitch than it is. The pitch of the ''yin ping'' tone changes from /44/ to /35/ when sandhi occurs. Similarly, the ''qu'' tone changes from /53/ to /55/ under sandhi.

Sandhi	+ Yin Ping	+ Yang Ping	+ Shang	+ Qu	+ Yin Ru	+ YangRu	+ Neutral
Yin Ping +	44 + 44	35 + 11	35 + 31	35 + 53	35 + 1	44 + 5	35 + ~
Qu +	53 + 44	55 + 11	55 + 31	55 + 53	55 + 1	53 + 5	55 + ~

The neutral tone is indicated by the tilde occurring in some postfixes used in Hakka. Its pitch level can be approximated by /3/.

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 tones, 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 (with yin-yang registers in Ping and Ru tones and a Shang tone).
The Hoi-liuk (Hailu 海陸) Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from this region. This particular dialect contains postalveloar consonants (, , , etc.), usually not found in other Chinese languages. Taiwan's other main population of Hakka speakers, the Sixian (Hakka: Siyen 四縣) 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 because 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 (Mandarin ''rén'')

碗 bowl (Mand. ''wǎn'')

狗 dog (Mand. ''gǒu'')

牛 cow (Mand. ''niú'')

屋 house (Mand. ''wū'')

嘴 mouth (Mand. ''zuǐ'')

𠊎 me/I (Mand. 我''wǒ'')

'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 ).
Hakka uses 食, like Cantonese (''sik'') for the verb "to eat" and "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'' (1993, 1138 pp., see [2]), 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 (including ones unique to Hakka) and are based on the dialects of Taiwanese Hakka speakers.
The popular ''Le Petit Prince'' has also been translated into Hakka (2000, indirectly from English), specifically the Miaoli dialect of Taiwan (itself a variant of the Sixian dialect). This also was dual-script, albeit using the Tongyong Pinyin scheme.

References

External links

★ Hakka text-to-speech

★ Hakka People Online

★ Classification of Hakka Dialects

★ Meixian/Moiyen Romanisation Scheme

★ Aspects of Meixian/Moiyen Dialect of Hakka Phonology

★ Information about Hakka

★ Video with basic hakka sentences as used by the East Timorese Chinese

★ Chinese to Hakka Character Converter