ABSTRACT
The word 客家 kèjiā ‘Hakka’, literally denoting ‘guests’, symbolizes the social status of the Hakka people. Two views are held in the literature as to the formation of Hakka people. One view holds that the Hakka people originated from the Central Plains of China, and because of foreign invasions, civil wars, and other historical reasons, they moved southwards to mainly the southern areas of China. The word 客家 ‘Hakka’ is hence used as a category to refer to those migrant northerners as a distinction of the local inhabitants. Subsequently, after a couple of major moves, around the middle of the 19th century, some Hakka people finally migrated to Taiwan and scattered around the island (cf. Hashimoto, 1973; Luo, 1998). An alternative, and perhaps linguistically more reasonable, view holds that the so-called 客家 ‘Hakka’ refers to a hybrid group emerging from the southern Gan during the Song Dynasty (10th~13th centuries). The Hakka language is a mixture of Chinese and non-Chinese languages, bearing certain linguistic features similar to non-Chinese languages such as She and Yao around Gan areas. With subsequent migrations, they moved down to southeastern Jiangxi and western Fujian, and further south to northeastern Guangdong. Afterwards, some Hakka people migrated southwards to Taiwan in the early Qing Dynasty (cf. Chappell and Lamarre, 2005). After several generations, the Hakka language featured dialectal differences because of geographical and historical matters. Taiwan Hakka (台湾客语) used in this paper refers to the various varieties spoken by the Hakka ethnic groups in Taiwan. These Hakka dialects used in Taiwan may have fostered variations in sounds and usages different from the Hakka language still used in the Mainland. This discussion is based on Taiwan Hakka.
