Name:
客家 Hakka (kejia)
Population:
25,725,000 (PRC); 29,937,000 (World)
Region:
Mainly Southern, but found in small communities scattered throughout the Mainland and Taiwan.
Information:
The name of this group translates as “Guest,” and Hakka is actually the Yue (Cantonese) pronunciation. In Mandarin, 客家 is pronounced ke4jia, and in Hakka, it sounds more like "kaka." The moniker “guest” was actually a pejorative assigned to the Hakka by native inhabitants of Southern China because the Hakka migrated en-masse throughout the South during the Qing dynasty and settled in the midst of speakers of other dialects. For a long time, many Southerners believed that Hakka were not Han Chinese, but rather some foreign nationality similar to today’s National Minorities.
Hakka are found throughout the Yue and Min areas of the South. Because they tend to live in small communities surrounded by people who speak other dialects, Hakka have a strong identity as an ethnic group as well as a language group. In fact, there is even a tendency among the Hakka to claim famous people as their own. For example, Premier Zhou Enlai, 周恩来, was a famous Hakka (客家人).
Hakka identify themselves as a historically Northern Chinese group, but their dialect is distinctly Southern.
Characteristics:
- Final Stops -p, -t, -k.
- Nasal palatal ny-, an allophone of ng- that only occurs before the vowel i.
- Initial consonant ng-.
- Six tones.
- More shared vocabulary with Northern dialects than is characteristic in the other Southern dialects, Min and Yue.