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Taiwanese Hakka

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Hakka ( Chinese : 客家话 ; pinyin : Kèjiāhuà ; Pha̍k-fa-sṳ : Hak-kâ-va / Hak-kâ-fa , Chinese : 客家语 ; pinyin : Kèjiāyǔ ; Pha̍k-fa-sṳ : Hak-kâ-ngî ) forms a language group of varieties of Chinese , spoken natively by the Hakka people in parts of Southern China , Taiwan , some diaspora areas of Southeast Asia and in overseas Chinese communities around the world.

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32-502: Taiwanese Hakka is a language group consisting of Hakka dialects spoken in Taiwan , and mainly used by people of Hakka ancestry . Taiwanese Hakka is divided into five main dialects: Sixian , Hailu , Dabu , Raoping , and Zhao'an . The most widely spoken of the five Hakka dialects in Taiwan are Sixian and Hailu. The former, possessing 6 tones, originates from Meizhou , Guangdong , and

64-471: A language shift to the more dominant Taiwanese Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien . The number of Hakka speakers in Taiwan has declined by 1.1% per year, particularly among youth. In 2016, only 22.8% of self-identifying Hakkas aged 19 to 29 spoke the language. Today, Taiwanese Hakka tends to be used within families and within local communities, which has reduced intergenerational transmission. An estimated 2 million Hakkas now self-identify as Hoklo . Furthermore,

96-624: A shang tone). In Taiwan , there are two main dialects: Sixian and Hailu (alternatively known as Haifeng; Hailu refers to Haifeng County and Lufeng County ). Most Hakka speakers in Taiwan can trace their ancestry to these two regions. Sixian speakers come from Jiaying Prefecture, mainly from the four counties of Chengxiang (now Meixian District ), Zhengping (now Jiaoling ), Xingning and Pingyuan . Most dialects of Taiwanese Hakka , except Sixian and Dabu, preserved postalveolar consonants ( [tʃ] , [tʃʰ] , [ʃ] and [ʒ] ), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese varieties. Ethnologue reports

128-781: 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 Learning Power(學習強國) Platform under the supervision of the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party had added automatic broadcasting in Hakka Chinese. Areal feature In geolinguistics , areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in

160-480: A geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language , i.e. a common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted with lingual-genealogically determined similarity within the same language family . Features may diffuse from one dominant language to neighbouring languages (see " sprachbund "). Genetic relationships are represented in the family tree model of language change, and areal relationships are represented in

192-430: A norm in their community, but children do. Linguistic features are diffused across an area by contacts among adults. Languages branch into dialects and thence into related languages through small changes in the course of children's learning processes which accumulate over generations, and when speech communities do not communicate (frequently) with each other, these cumulative changes diverge. Diffusion of areal features for

224-498: A result of shared areal features . Taiwan designates Hakka as one of its national languages , thus regarding the language as a subject for its study and preservation. Pronunciation differences exist between the Taiwanese Hakka dialects and mainland China's Hakka dialects; even in Taiwan, two major local varieties of Hakka exist. The Meixian dialect (Moiyen) of northeast Guangdong in mainland China has been taken as

256-583: Is available, determining whether the similarity is genetic or merely areal can be difficult. Edward Sapir notably used evidence of contact and diffusion as a negative tool for genetic reconstruction, treating it as a subject in its own right only at the end of his career (e.g., for the influence of Tibetan on Tocharian ). William Labov in 2007 reconciled the tree and wave models in a general framework based on differences between children and adults in their language learning ability. Adults do not preserve structural features with sufficient regularity to establish

288-484: Is commonly believed that Hakka people have their origins in several episodes of migration from northern China into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest dating back as far as the end of Western Jin . The forebears of the Hakka came from present-day Central Plains provinces of Henan and Shaanxi , and brought with them features of Chinese varieties spoken in those areas during that time. (Since then,

320-565: Is mainly spoken in Miaoli , Pingtung and Kaohsiung , while the latter, possessing 7 tones, originates from Haifeng and Lufeng , Guangdong , and is concentrated around Hsinchu . Taiwanese Hakka is also officially listed as one of the national languages of Taiwan. In addition to the five main dialects, there are the northern Xihai dialect and the patchily-distributed Yongding, Fengshun, Wuping, Wuhua, and Jiexi dialects. In 2014, 4.2 million Taiwanese self-identified as Hakka, accounting for 18% of

352-400: Is not mutually intelligible with Yue , Wu , Min , Mandarin or other branches of Chinese, and itself contains a few mutually unintelligible varieties. It is most closely related to Gan and is sometimes classified as a variety of Gan, with a few northern Hakka varieties even being partially mutually intelligible with southern Gan. There is also a possibility that the similarities are just

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384-602: The Hong Kong dialect lacks the [-u-] medial, so whereas the Meixian dialect pronounces the character 光 as [kwɔŋ˦] , the Hong Kong Hakka dialect pronounces it as [kɔŋ˧] , which is similar to the Hakka spoken in neighbouring Shenzhen . 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 checked tones ( rusheng ), and

416-464: The Song Dynasty . In Hakka and southern Gan, Sagart (2002) identifies a non-Chinese substratum that is possibly Hmong-Mien , an archaic layer, and a more recent Late Middle Chinese layer. Lexical connections between Hakka, Kra-Dai, and Hmong-Mien have also been suggested by Deng (1999). Due to the migration of its speakers, Hakka may have been influenced by other language areas through which

448-467: The wave model . Resemblances between two or more languages (whether in typology or in vocabulary) have been observed to result from several mechanisms, including lingual genealogical relation (descent from a common ancestor language, not principally related to biological genetics); borrowing between languages; retention of features when a population adopts a new language; and chance coincidence. When little or no direct documentation of ancestor languages

480-593: The "standard" dialect by the government of mainland China. The Guangdong Provincial Education Department created an official romanization of Moiyen in 1960, one of four languages receiving this status in Guangdong. The She ethnic group and Hakka people have a history of contact, and Hakka language has entered the She language in large numbers. The name of the Hakka people who are the predominant original native speakers of

512-692: The Hakka community established the Restore My Mother Tongue Movement to advocate for the right to use and preserve the Hakka language. Language restrictions were relaxed after 1987 with the lifting of martial law and ensuing democratic reforms. In 2012, the ministry-level Hakka Affairs Council was established to stem the language's decline in Taiwan. In December 2017, the Legislative Yuan designated Hakka as an official national language of Taiwan. While Hakka has official status in Taiwan, it has seen ongoing decline due to

544-659: The Hakka-speaking forebears migrated. For instance, common vocabulary is found in Hakka, Min , and the She (Hmong–Mien) languages. Today, most She people in Fujian and Zhejiang speak She , which is closely related to Hakka. A regular pattern of sound change can generally be detected in Hakka, as in most Chinese varieties, of the derivation of phonemes from earlier forms of Chinese. Some examples: Hakka has as many regional dialects as there are counties with Hakka speakers as

576-604: The Meixian government. On April 10th, 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) 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

608-557: The characters originally of this tone class are distributed across the non- ru tones. An example of such a dialect is Changting , 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 and Lufeng , situated in coastal southeastern 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

640-443: The dialects of Hakka as being Yue-Tai (Meixian, Wuhua, Raoping, Taiwan Kejia: Meizhou above), Yuezhong (Central Guangdong), Huizhou, Yuebei (Northern Guangdong), Tingzhou (Min-Ke), Ning-Long (Longnan), Yugui, and Tonggu. Like other southern Chinese varieties, Hakka retains many single syllable words from earlier stages of Chinese; thus, a large number of syllables are distinguished by tone and final consonant. This reduces

672-496: The great diversity of Hakka dialects used throughout Taiwan has impeded standardization of Hakka for teaching. Hakka Chinese Due to its primary usage in isolated regions where communication is limited to the local area, Hakka has developed numerous varieties or dialects , spoken in different provinces, such as Guangdong , Guangxi , Hainan , Fujian , Sichuan , Hunan , Jiangxi , Guizhou , as well as in Taiwan , Singapore , Malaysia , Thailand and Indonesia . Hakka

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704-408: The majority. Some of these Hakka dialects are not mutually intelligible with each other. Meixian is surrounded by the counties of Pingyuan , Dabu , Jiaoling , Xingning , Wuhua , and Fengshun . Each county has its own special phonological points of interest. For instance, Xingning lacks the codas [-m] and [-p] . These have merged into [-n] and [-t] , respectively. Further away from Meixian,

736-454: The meanings in Hakka are different, 'to stutter' and 'be thirsty' respectively. Hakka Chinese is typically written using Chinese characters ( 漢字 , 漢字 Hon-sṳ ). Various dialects of Hakka such as Taiwanese Hakka , is sometimes written in the Latin script or Pha̍k-fa-sṳ . Dialects of Hakka have been written in a number of Latin orthographies, largely for religious purposes, since at least

768-523: The mid-19th century. 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. In 1950, China Central People's Broadcasting Station recruited the first Hakka broadcaster, Zhang Guohua, based on a radius of two kilometers from

800-456: The most part hinges on low-level phonetic shifts, whereas tree-model transmission includes in addition structural factors such as "grammatical conditioning, word boundaries, and the systemic relations that drive chain shifting". In some areas with high linguistic diversity, a number of areal features have spread across a set of languages to form a sprachbund (also known as a linguistic area, convergence area or diffusion area). Some examples are

832-601: The need for compound words. However, like other Chinese varieties, it does have words of more than one syllable. Hakka, as well as numerous other Chinese varieties such as Min and Cantonese, prefers the verb [kɔŋ˧˩] 講 when referring to 'saying', rather than the Mandarin shuō 說 (Hakka [sɔt˩] / [ʃɔt˩] ). Hakka uses 食 ( [sɘt˥] / [ʃit˥] ) for the verb 'to eat' and 'to drink', unlike Mandarin which prefers chī 吃 (Hakka [kʰɛt˩] / [kʰiɛt˩] ) as 'to eat' and hē 喝 (Hakka [hɔt˩] ) as 'to drink' where

864-712: The population. The Hakka Affairs Council has designated 70 townships and districts across Taiwan where the Hakka account for more than a third of the total population, including 18 in Miaoli County , 11 in Hsinchu County , and another 8 in Pingtung , Hualien , and Taoyuan counties each. With the introduction of martial law in 1949, the KMT-led government repressed Hakka , along with Taiwanese Hokkien and other indigenous languages in favor of Mandarin. In 1988,

896-472: 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 -p -t -k , as are found in other modern southern Chinese varieties, but which have been lost in Mandarin. Laurent Sagart (2002) considers Hakka and southern Gan Chinese to be sister dialects that descended from a single common ancestral language (Proto-Southern Gan) spoken in central Jiangxi during

928-487: The variety literally means "guest families" or "guest people": Hak (Mandarin: kè ) means "guest", and ka (Mandarin: jiā ) means "family". Among themselves, Hakka people variously called their language Hak-ka-fa ( -va ), Kak-ka-fa ( -va ), Hak-fa ( -va ), Kak-fa ( -va ), Tu-gong-dung-fa ( -va ), literally "Native Guangdong language", and Ngai-fa ( -va ), "My/our language". In Tonggu County , Jiangxi province, people call their language Huai-yuan-fa . It

960-513: 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 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)

992-545: 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 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)

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1024-683: 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 is used on Sihai Kejia Channel. In 2019, Shenzhou Easy Radio(神州之聲) added

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