THE HAKKA LANGUAGE

by in Blog

Hakka is one of the major minority Han dialects of China. After Mandarin, comes Cantonese, Gan (of which Hakka has at times been classified as a subdivision), Min, Hakka and then the other less well known dialects.

According to published articles (Alternopedia – direct quotes):

Hakka Chinese

Hakka
客家話 / 客家话

Kejiahua.png

Hak-kâ-fa/Hak-kâ-va (Hakka/Kejia) written in Chinese characters
Native to Mainland China, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan,Japan (due to presence of Taiwanese community in Tokyo-Yokohama Metropolitan Area), Singapore, Philippines,Indonesia, Mauritius, Suriname, South Africa, India and other countries where Hakka Chinese migrants have settled.
Region in China: Eastern Guangdong province; adjoining regions of Fujian and Jiangxiprovinces
Ethnicity Hakka people (Han Chinese)
Native speakers 31 million  (2007)[1]
Language family Sino-Tibetan
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); one of the statutory languages for public transport announcements in the ROC [2]; ROC government sponsors Hakka-language television station to preserve language
Regulated by The Guangdong Provincial Education Department created an official romanisation of Meixian Hakka dialect in 1960, one of four languages receiving this status in Guangdong. It is called Kejiahua Pinyin Fang’an.
Language codes
ISO 639-3 hak
Hakka in China.png
Hakka
Traditional Chinese 客家話
Simplified Chinese 客家话
Hakka Hak-kâ-fa
or Hak-kâ-va
Transcriptions
Gan
– Romanization Khak-ka-ua
Hakka
– Romanization Hak-kâ-fa
or Hak-kâ-va
Mandarin
– Hanyu Pinyin Kèjiāhuà
Min
– Hokkien POJ Kheh-oē (客話)
Cantonese (Yue)
– Jyutping haak3 gaa1 waa2
– Yale Romanization haak gā wá

Hakka is one of the major Chinese language subdivisions or varieties and is spoken natively by the Hakka people in southern China, Taiwan and throughout the diasporaareas of East Asia, Southeast Asia and around the world.

Due to its primary usage in scattered isolated regions where communication is limited to the local area, the Hakka language has developed numerous variants or dialects, spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, and Guizhouprovinces, including Hainan island, Sabah, Singapore and Taiwan. Hakka is notmutually intelligible with Mandarin, Wu, Min Nan, or other branches of Chinese. It is most closely related to Gan, and is sometimes classified as a variety of Gan.[3]

Taiwan, where Hakka language is the mother tongue of a significant minority of the island’s residents, is an important world center for study of the language. Pronunciation differences exist between the Taiwanese Hakka dialect and China’s Guangdong Hakka dialect, and even in Taiwan two local varieties of Hakka exist within that dialect.

The Moi-yen/Moi-yan (梅縣, Pinyin: Méixiàn) dialect of northeast Guangdong in China has been taken as the “standard” dialect by the Chinese government. TheGuangdong Provincial Education Department created an official romanization of Moiyen in 1960, one of four languages receiving this status in Guangdong.

Contents

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: jiā) 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) 話, “My/our language”.

History

Early history

The Hakka people have their origins in several episodes of migration from northernChina into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest.[4] 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. (Since then the speech in those regions has evolved into dialects of modern Mandarin.) Hakka is quite conservative, and is generally closer to Middle Chinese than other modern Chinese languages.[5] The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants -p -t -k, as are found in other modern southern Chinese languages, but which have been lost in Mandarin. The difference between Hakka and the better-known Cantonese may be compared to that between Portuguese and Spanish, whereas Mandarin might be compared to French – more distantly related, and with a quite different phonology.

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 She (Hmong–Mien) languages.

Some people consider Hakka to have mixed with other languages, such as the language of theShe 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 phonemes from earlier forms of Chinese. Some examples:

  • Characters such as 武 (war, martial arts) or 屋 (room, house), pronounced roughly mwioand uk in Early Middle Chinese, have an initial v phoneme in Hakka, being vu and vuk in Hakka respectively (Mandarin: wu).
  • The initial phonemes of the characters 人 and 日, among others, are a ng consonant in Hakka (人:ngin, 日:ngit), and have a corresponding reading in Mandarin as an initial r-consonant.
  • The initial consonant phoneme exhibited by the character 話 (word, speech; Mandarinhua) 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 hɔk usually corresponds with an h [h] approximant in Hakka and a voiceless alveo-palatal fricative (x [ɕ]) in Mandarin.

Phonology

Further information: Meixian dialect

Dialects

The Hakka language has as many regional dialects as there are counties with Hakka speakers in the majority. Some of these Hakka dialects are not mutually intelligible with each other. Surrounding Meixian are the counties of Pingyuan 平遠 (Hakka: Pin Yen), Dabu 大埔 (Hakka: Tai Pu), Jiaoling 蕉嶺 (Hakka: Jiao Liang), Xingning 興寧 (Hakka: Hin Nen), Wuhua 五華 (Hakka: Ng Fah), and Fengshun 豐順 (Hakka: Foong Soon). Each is said to have its own special phonological points of interest. For instance, the Xingning does not have rimes ending in [-m] or [-p]. These have merged into [-n] and[-t] ending rimes, respectively. Further away from Meixian, the Hong Kong dialect lacks the [-u-] medial, so whereas Moiyen 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 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).

In Taiwan, there are two main dialects: Sixian (Hakka: Siyen 四縣) and Haifeng (Hakka: Hoi Foong 海豐), alternatively known as Hailu (Hakka: Hoiluk 海陸). Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from these two regions. Sixian (Hakka: Siyen 四縣) speakers come from Jiaying 嘉應 and surrounding Jiaoling, Pingyuan, Xingning, and Wuhua. Jiaying county later changed its name to Meixian. The Hoiliuk dialect contains postalveolar consonants ([ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], etc.), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese languages. 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

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 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.

monosyllabic words
Hakka hanzi Prouncation English Notes
人 [ŋin˩] person
碗 [ʋɔn˧˩] bowl
狗 [kɛu˧˩] dog
牛 [ŋiu˩] cow
屋 [ʋuk˩] house
嘴 [tsɔi˥˧] mouth
𠊎 [ŋai˩] me / I In Hakka, the standard Chinese equivalent 我 is pronounced [ŋɔ˧].
渠[6] or 𠍲[7] [ki˩] he / she / it In Hakka, the standard Chinese equivalent 他 / 她 / 它 is pronounced [tʰa˧].
polysyllabic words
Hakka hanzi Prouncation English
日頭 [ŋit˩ tʰɛu˩] sun
月光 [ŋiɛt˥ kʷɔŋ˦] moon
屋下 [ʋuk˩ kʰa˦] home
屋家
電話 [tʰiɛn˥ ʋa˥˧] telephone
學堂 [hɔk˥ tʰɔŋ˩] school

Hakka prefers the verb [kɔŋ˧˩] 講 when referring to speaking 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.

Examples
Hanzi IPA English
阿妹, 若姆去投墟轉來唔曾? [a˦ mɔi˥, ɲja˦ mi˦ hi˥ tʰju˩ hi˦ tsɔn˧˩ lɔi˩ m˦ tsʰɛn˩] Has your mother returned from going to the market yet, child?
其佬弟捉到隻蛘葉來搞. [kja˦ lau˧˩ tʰai˦ tsuk˧ tau˧˩ tsak˩ jɔŋ˩ jap˥ lɔi˩ kau˧˩] His younger brother caught a butterfly to play with.
好冷阿, 水桶个水敢凝冰阿 [hau˧˩ laŋ˦ ɔ˦, sui˧˩ tʰuŋ˧ kai˥˧ sui˧˩ kam˦ kʰɛn˩ pɛn˦ ɔ˦] It’s very cold, the water in the bucket has frozen over.

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 The Bible in Chinese: Hakka), although that is expected to be surpassed soon by the publication of the Old Testament. 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.

See also

Further reading

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ Nationalencyklopedin “Världens 100 största språk 2007” The World’s 100 Largest Languages in 2007
  2. ^ Hakka was written in Chinese characters by missionaries around the turn of the 20th century.[1]
  3. ^ Thurgood & LaPolla, 2003. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Routledge.
  4. ^ Hakka Migration
  5. ^ Language
  6. ^ p.xxvi 客語拼音字彙, 劉鎮發, 中文大學出版社, ISBN 962-201-750-9
  7. ^ http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/yitic/frc/frc00280.htm

Notations

Leave a comment