Hakka linguisticsHakka is one language in the family of languages known as Chinese. The majority of its speakers are known Hakka people. Hak 客 (Mandarin: kè) means "guest", and ka 家 (Mandarin: jia) means "family". Amongst themselves, Hakka people variously called their language Hak-ka-fa/-va 客家語, Hak-fa/-va, 客語, Tu-gong-dung-fa/-va 土廣東話, Ngai-fa/-va "亻厓"話 (my/our speech). The Hakka language has numerous dialects, spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou provinces, including Hainan island and Taiwan.
Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Hakka is a language or a dialect. Please see here for the issues surrounding this dispute.
HistoryThe 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 dialects spoken in those areas during the time. (Since then the speech in those regions evolved into dialects of modern Mandarin.) The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants -p -t -k, as found in other modern southern Chinese dialect, but have been lost in some northern Mandarin dialects. Due to the migration of its speakers, Hakka language may have been influenced by other language areas where Hakka speaking forebears migrated through. For instance, common vocabulary found in Hakka, Min and Cantonese Chinese languages. Hakka phonologyMoiyen dialect initialsThere are no voiced plosives stops (b d g) in Hakka, but it exhibits two sets of stops, one unaspirated (p t k), and the other aspirated (pʰ tʰ kʰ).
When the initials z c s (ʦ ʦʰ s) and ng [ŋ] is followed by a palatised medial, they become j q x (ʨ ʨʰ ɕ) and ngi (ɲ) respectively. Moiyan rimesMoiyan Hakka has six vowels ( i ɿ ɛ a ə ɔ u ) are romanised as i, i, ê a, e, o and u respectively. The palatisation medial (j) is represented by i and the labialisation medial (w) is represented as u in the following table corresponding to i and u in the romanisation. Moreover, Hakka rimes exhibits the final stops found in Middle Chinese, namely ( m, n, ŋ p t k ) these are romanised as m, n, ng, b, d, and g respectively in the official Moiyan romanisation.
Moiyen tonesThe 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 Moiyan 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 unvoiced initial characters (p- t- k-) tending to become of the yin type, and the voiced initial characters (b- d- g-) developing into the yang type. In modern Meixian Hakka however, part of the Yin Ping tone characters have sonorant initials (m n ŋ l) 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. Tone Sandhi in Moiyen HakkaFor Meixian 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.
The neutral tone is indicated by the tilde occurring in some postfixes used in Hakka. Its pitch level can is approximated by /3/. Other dialects of HakkaThe Hakka language has as many regional dialects as there are counties of 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 are said to have their 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 lacts the -u- medial, so whereas Meixian dialect pronounces the character 光 as [kwɔŋ44], Hong Kong Hakka dialect pronounces it as [kɔŋ33], which is similar to the Hakka spoken in neighbouring Shenzhen. In 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 its Ru Sheng tones, and the characters originally of this tone class are distributed across the non-Ru tones. Such as dialect is ChangTing 長汀 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 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 Hailu 海陸 Hakka dialects speakers found on Taiwan originated from this region. 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. Written traditionsIn Taiwan, Hakka has been written in a Latin orthography, largely for religious texts, since at least the early 20th century. Currently the single largest work in Hakka is the New Testament and Psalms (1993, 1138 pp., see [2] (http://www.worldscriptures.org/pages/chinesehakka.html)), 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). This also was dual-script, albeit using the Tongyong Pinyin scheme. External links
ja:客家語
Categories: Sino-Tibetan languages | Languages of China | Languages of Taiwan |
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