Lingnan ( simplified Chinese : 岭南 ; traditional Chinese : 嶺南 ; pinyin : lǐng nán ; Jyutping : ling5 naam4 ; lit. 'South of the [Nanling] Mountains'; Vietnamese : Lĩnh Nam ) is a geographic area referring to the lands in the south of the Nanling Mountains . The region covers the modern Chinese subdivisions of Guangdong , Guangxi , Hainan , Hong Kong & Macau and Northern Vietnam .
96-1149: The Hakka ( Chinese : 客家 ), sometimes also referred to as Hakka-speaking Chinese , or Hakka Chinese , or Hakkas , are a southern Han Chinese subgroup whose principal settlements and ancestral homes are dispersed widely across the provinces of southern China and who speak a language that is closely related to Gan , a Han Chinese dialect spoken in Jiangxi province. They are differentiated from other southern Han Chinese by their dispersed nature and tendency to occupy marginal lands and remote hilly areas. The Chinese characters for Hakka ( 客 家 ) literally mean "guest families". The Hakka have settled in Guangdong , Fujian , Jiangxi , Guangxi , Sichuan , Hunan , Zhejiang , Hainan , and Guizhou in China, as well as in Taoyuan City , Hsinchu County , Miaoli County , Pingtung County , and Kaohsiung City in Taiwan . Their presence
192-547: A family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
288-469: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
384-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
480-510: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
576-772: A Hakka satellite cable channel " Hakka TV ". In Taiwan, there are seven Hakka Chinese radio channels. In 2005, Meixian Radio and Television Station (梅縣廣播電視臺) was reorganized after the separation of the National Cultural System Reform Bureau. It is a public institution under the jurisdiction of the Meixian County Party Committee and County Government. The channel can be watched in Meizhou and surrounding area with an audience of over 4 million people. In 2012, Voice of Hong Kong (香港之聲) started broadcasting. Hakka Chinese
672-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
768-476: A UNESCO World Heritage Site . Another very popular architectural style in northern east Guangdong, such as Xingning and Meixian , is Wrapped Dragon Village (Chinese: 圍龍屋 ; pinyin: wéilóngwū ). Hakka cuisine is known for the use of preserved meats and tofu, as well as stewed and braised dishes. Some of the popular dishes are Yong Tau Foo and Lei Cha . These dishes are popular in Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore. The taste profile
864-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
960-615: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1056-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
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#17327574239991152-640: A greater degree than other southern Chinese. Unlike other Han Chinese groups, the Hakkas are not named after a geographical region, e.g. a province, county or city. The Hakka people have a distinct identity from the Cantonese people . As 60% of the Hakkas in China reside in Guangdong province, and 95% of overseas Hakkas ancestral homes are in Guangdong. Hakkas from Chaoshan , Guangzhou, and Fujian may self-identify as only Chaoshanese, Cantonese and Hokkiens. It
1248-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1344-534: A respect for family, ancestor veneration, and a commitment to both learning and the ideals of a Confucian gentleman. Finally, they carry Han Chinese surnames and use Han Chinese naming conventions. Lingnan Hakka place names indicate a long history of the Hakka being culturally Han Chinese. Like the Cantonese, they fiercely insisted on their Han identities and were principal movers of the Anti-Qing movement. However,
1440-457: A result, many Hakka men turned towards careers in the military or in public service. Hakka people built several types of tulou and peasant fortified villages in the mountainous rural parts of far western Fujian and adjacent southern Jiangxi and northern Guangdong regions. A representative sample of Fujian tulou (consisting of 10 buildings or building groups) in Fujian was inscribed in 2008 as
1536-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
1632-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
1728-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
1824-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
1920-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2016-531: Is a Hakka Chinese food consisting primarily of tofu that has been filled with either a ground meat mixture or fish paste. It can be eaten dry with sauce or served in a soup base. Suanpanzi is another popular Hakka dish which literally means "abacus seeds". It consists of mainly yam or tapioca beaten in to the shape of abacus beads. The dish is served with minced pork or chicken and with light seasoning. Hakka hill songs are traditionally used by hillside farmers in parts of Taiwan and China, mainly for entertainment in
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#17327574239992112-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
2208-486: Is commonly held that the Hakkas are a subgroup of the Han Chinese that originated in the central plains. To trace their origins, a number of theories so far have been brought forth among anthropologists, linguists and historians: The theories indicating a descent from both northern and southern Han are the most likely and are together supported by multiple scientific studies into the genetics. Furthermore, research into
2304-531: Is especially prominent in the Lingnan or Liangguang area, comprising the Cantonese -speaking provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi . Despite being partly assimilated to the Cantonese-speaking population, they retain a significant presence there. Like the other southern Han Chinese subgroups, Hakka mainly comprise Central Plains Chinese refugees fleeing social unrest, upheaval, and invasions. However,
2400-502: Is generally light, tending even towards blandness, with a preference for allowing the taste of the ingredients, especially the herbs, to emerge through any seasoning. Lei cha is a traditional Southern Chinese tea-based beverage or rice gruel that forms a part of Hakka cuisine . Ingredients include green tea, basil, sawtooth coriander, mug wort, and a kind of herb known as "Fu Yip Sum". Generally regarded as laborious and difficult to make. Usually eaten with side dishes. Yong tau foo
2496-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
2592-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
2688-541: Is really the Southern Chinese, because many Southern Chinese are also from Northern Asia; Hakka or non-Hakka. It is known that the earliest major waves of Hakka migration began due to the attacks of the two aforementioned tribes during the Jin dynasty (266–420) . The study of this population group is complicated by linguistic uncertainty and nomenclatural ambiguity in the historical record. The term Hakka ( 客 家 )
2784-504: Is sometimes broadly used to refer to other southern Han Chinese groups during their southward migration. Imperial census statistics did not distinguish what varieties of Chinese the population spoke. Some family genealogies also employ the term Hakka ( 客 家 ) to refer to their southward migration, even though they belonged to the earlier groups of Han Chinese settlers and did not speak a Gan-affiliated language. These clans would be properly regarded as belonging to local dialect groups due to
2880-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
2976-523: Is still used for news program, radio drama program, emotional program, entertainment program and cultural program. In 1999, 3CW Chinese Radio Australia (3CW澳大利亞中文廣播電臺) was launched. It used Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka. In 2001, Meizhou Television Station merged with Meizhou People's Broadcasting Station and was renamed Meizhou Radio and Television Station (MRT, 梅州廣播電視臺) . In 2004, the station had officially completed its establishment. In 2003, Taiwan Broadcasting System (TBS, 臺灣公共廣播電視集團) established
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3072-489: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
3168-582: Is the primary form of religious expression. One distinctively Hakka religious practice involves the worship of dragon deities. People of Hakka ancestry comprised the notable mainstay of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom , although other dialect groups also enlisted. The leader of the Xiang Army , Zeng Guofan , had a special contempt for Hakka women, referring to them as "hillbilly witches". In retaliation for killing three Hunanese officers,
3264-501: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
3360-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
3456-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
3552-857: Is used on Sihai Kejia Channel. In 2019, Shenzhou Easy Radio (神州之聲) added a Hakka Chinese radio break which broadcasts to the southeast coast of mainland China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and Japan. On Radio The Greater Bay (大灣區之聲) , Sihai Kejia Channel has also joined. In 2023, The Xuexi Qiangguo (學習強國) Platform under the supervision of the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party added automatic broadcasting in Hakka Chinese. The religious practices of Hakka people are largely similar to those of other Han Chinese. Ancestor veneration
3648-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
3744-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
3840-626: The Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in
3936-533: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
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4032-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
4128-534: The Ministry of Education named "Taiwanese Hakka Chinese" as one of the languages of Taiwan . Hakka culture has been largely shaped by the new environment, which they had to alter many aspects of their culture to adapt, which helped influence their architecture and cuisine. When the Hakka expanded into areas with pre-existing populations in the South, there was often little agricultural land left for them to farm. As
4224-595: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
4320-478: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
4416-596: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
4512-626: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Lingnan The area
4608-420: The 16th century, in response to an economic boom, the Hakkas moved into hilly areas to mine for zinc and lead and also moved into the coastal plains to cultivate cash crops. After an economic downturn, many of these ventures failed, and many Hakka had to turn to pillaging to survive. Studies show extensive gene flows and a very close relationship between the Hakka and the surrounding Han Chinese populations in
4704-797: The Cantonese, the Teochew and the Hoklo people. In 1950, China Central People's Broadcasting Station recruited the first Hakka broadcaster, Zhang Guohua, based on a radius of two kilometers from the Meixian government. On April 10, 1950, the Voice of Hakka (客家之聲) started broadcasting. It broadcast nine hours of Hakka Chinese programs every day through shortwave radio and online radio, targeting countries and regions where Hakka people gather, such as Japan, Indonesia, Mauritius, Reunion Island, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 1988, Meizhou Television Station (梅州電視臺)
4800-652: The Hakka as displaying non-Han habits and as opportunists intruding on Cantonese territory. The conflict between the two groups led to one of the largest inter-ethnic genocides in history. The Red Turban rebels, who were mostly of Cantonese ancestry, carried out a genocidal campaign against the Hakkas during a revolt against the Qing dynasty. The Cantonese Red Turbans killed 13 Hakka village chiefs and 7,630 other Hakkas while on their way to Heshan, and after conquering it, they killed another 1,320 Hakkas. The bloody Punti–Hakka Clan Wars , saw reciprocal massacres by both groups, but
4896-476: The Hakka bore the brunt of the casualties. This war eventually killed some 500,000 Hakkas (or quite possibly even more). During these killings, the Cantonese generally collaborated with the Xiang people, since both dialect groups had an axe to grind against the Hakka. In retaliation for a Hakka massacre of Cantonese people, Cantonese peasants butchered 500 Hakkas in a village located in the rural Enping county forcing
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#17327574239994992-412: The Hakka differed in their lifestyles and their preferred mode of habitation - living in large communal fortress-like buildings (known as tulou) instead of residing in courtyard houses (or siheyuan ). They also settled in marginal or hardscrabble hill land avoided by other Han Chinese subgroups, and in this regard, were considered similar to non-Han aborigines. They also exhibited gender egalitarianism to
5088-494: The Hakka were different in being late arrivals, moving from Central China into Southern China when the earlier groups of Han Chinese settlers in the south had already developed distinctive local identities and languages. Their migration path was also different, and they entered Guangdong, Guangxi and Fujian via Jiangxi province, instead of traversing Hunan or moving along the Fujian coast. Today, substantial numbers of Hakka Chinese have migrated overseas to various countries throughout
5184-614: The Hakkas and Cantonese in Perak, Malaya , leading to the Larut Wars . Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of
5280-565: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
5376-533: The Lingnan region by traversing Jiangxi and Fujian. During their journey through Jiangxi they intermarried with the Yao and She, two non-Han ethnic minorities. In Fujian, they developed the habit of living in communal fortresses. Intermarriage with aboriginal groups and the adoption of habits that diverged from the Han, such as communal fortress living, increased the Cantonese distaste for the Hakka and aroused suspicion. During
5472-457: The Study of the Hakkas (Hsin-Ning & Singapore, 1933) used genealogical sources of family clans from various southern counties, leading to the inclusion of native southern Han Chinese families into the Hakka category. Hakka Chinese is the native Chinese variety of the Hakka people. Hakka Chinese is the closest Chinese variety to Gan Chinese in terms of phonetics, with scholars studies consider
5568-580: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Xiang Army targeted Hakka villages and is estimated to have killed ~30,000 Hakkas every day during the height of the retaliation. Cantonese people have had a history of friction with Hakka, despite the both of them being Han subgroups speaking varieties of Chinese that exhibit relatively high mutual intelligibility (both dialects tracing straightforward descent from Middle Chinese). The Cantonese regarded
5664-528: The Xiang Army exterminated the entire Hakka population of Wukeng and Chixi during military counter-attacks on the Hakkas in the year 1888. The army also massacred tens of thousands of other Hakkas in Guanghai, a region of Taishan, Guangdong. Many of the killings in Guanghai took place in the Dalongdong area. The Taiping rebellion caused millions of casualties on both sides. In retaliation, after defeating
5760-486: The book by Chung Yoon-Ngan, The Hakka Chinese: Their Origin, Folk Songs And Nursery Rhymes , that the potential Hakka origins from the Northern Han and Xiongnu and that of the indigenous Southern She and Yue tribes, "are all correct, yet none alone explain the origin of the Hakka", pointing out that the problem with DNA profiling on limited numbers of people within population pools cannot correctly ascertain who
5856-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
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#17327574239995952-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
6048-576: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
6144-463: The farming fields and courting practices. They are characterized by the strong, resonating melody and voice, which echo around hills and can be heard for up to a mile around the area. Hill songs can be considered a form of communication, as its participants often use it to communicate love songs or news. Hakkapop is a genre of Hakka pop music made primarily in China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia. Historically, Hakka women did not bind their feet when
6240-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
6336-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
6432-618: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
6528-569: The justification of a Hakka conspiracy that the Jiaying group was surrendering the city to foreign control. On 27 August 1925, villages in a county belonged to the Hakka minority were attacked, Chiang's Punti (Cantonese) men and soldiers did not hesitate to rape their women and pillage their homes. Inter-ethnic hatred between the two groups also rose to a boil in Malaysia. Memories of conflict and old grudges sparked another round of conflict between
6624-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
6720-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
6816-533: The late Old Gan together with Hakka Chinese and the Tongtai dialect of Jianghuai Mandarin to have been the lingua franca of the Southern dynasties . Northern Hakka varieties have partial mutual intelligibility with southern Gan. Accordingly, Hakka is sometimes classified as a variety of Gan. Some studies posit that Hakka people and Gan people have close genetic relations and shared areal features . In Taiwan,
6912-486: The mitochondrial DNA of the Hakka indicates that the majority of their matrilineal gene pool consists of lineages prevalent in the southern Han. Clyde Kiang stated that the Hakkas' origins may also be linked with Han's ancient neighbors, the Dongyi and Xiongnu people. However, this is disputed by many scholars and Kiang's theories are considered to be false. Hakka Chinese scientist and researcher Dr. Siu-Leung Lee stated in
7008-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
7104-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
7200-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
7296-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
7392-413: The practice was commonplace in other parts of China. Hakka women are known for their independent nature and willingness to engage in hard work typically reserved for men in other dialect groups. This may have been driven by historical necessity rather than cultural differences, since the Hakka employed marginal hill lands which were less fertile than the river valley occupied by other Han subgroups, such as
7488-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
7584-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
7680-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
7776-517: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
7872-561: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
7968-588: The south than the other Han Chinese groups. The Hakka identify as Han Chinese and genetic studies show they are principally of Han ancestry, despite a recorded history of intermarriage with minority groups such as the Yao and the She. Furthermore, the Hakka language belongs to the Sinitic group of languages, being linguistically proximate to the Gan dialect of Jiangxi. The Hakka also exhibit traditional Confucian values, such as
8064-499: The south. According to a 2009 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics , Hakka are principally of Han Chinese descent, exhibiting an average genetic difference of 0.32% with other tested Han Chinese persons. Nonetheless, compared with other southern Han Chinese groups, the Hakka genetic profile exhibits a slight skew towards northern Han people. This is in line with their migratory history as later arrivals to
8160-545: The surviving Hakkas to flee, but these refugees, who numbered some 4,000 Hakka, were later all caught and killed by Cantonese peasants, who spared neither women nor child. Government officials mobilized officers and men from the local Cantonese peasants to regain the Guanghai area which was occupied by the Hakkas. The number of Hakkas killed was tens of thousands in the Dalongdong area of Guanghai alone. The Cantonese murdered more than 70 Hakka fellow provincials in Shanghai under
8256-413: The timing of their arrival, the language they spoke, the customs they practiced, and the route of their traversal. These families were not part of the groups of settlers today associated with the Hakka, who arrived in southern China at a much later date through Jiangxi province and who spoke a Gan-affiliated language. For example, the study by Lo Hsiang-lin , K'o-chia Yen-chiu Tao-Liu / An Introduction to
8352-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
8448-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
8544-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
8640-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
8736-418: The world. The Hakka arrived in southern China much later than other southern Han Chinese populations. These earlier waves of southern Han Chinese immigrants occupied the coastal areas and fertile lowlands and had already formed distinctive cultural identities and dialects. Consequently, the Hakka were forced to locate their settlements on marginal territories and relatively infertile land. The Hakka arrived in
8832-517: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
8928-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
9024-548: Was founded. In 1994, Hakka Public Channel , also known as Meizhou TV-2 had started broadcasting. Hakka Chinese began to appear in television programs. In 2021, it was renamed Hakka Life Channel (客家生活頻道) . In 1991, Meizhou People's Broadcasting Station (梅州人民廣播電臺) , also known as Meizhou Wired Broadcasting Station (梅州有線廣播電臺) officially started broadcasting. Meizhou Radio News: FM94.8 or urban FM101.9. Meizhou Radio Traffic Channel: FM105.8 MHz. Meizhou Radio Private Car Channel: FM94.0 or urban FM103.9. Until now, Hakka Chinese
9120-485: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
9216-539: Was inhabited by the Baiyue and was the base of the ancient kingdom of Nanyue . At that time, Lingnan was considered by the ancient Chinese court to be a tropical barbarian land that had no contact with the Zhongyuan , which was the cultural cradle of Chinese culture . In the second century BCE, the Han conquest of Nanyue led to its absorption into the Han dynasty during its southward expansion , and its development
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