 In the following, we will be giving a general overview of the Hakka language and its speakers. The Sinitic languages are a distinct branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, consisting of various local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. In China, they are all called fanyan, which means regional speech. We might call them Sinitic languages. The larger part of China is mostly covered by a range of dialects, which is all called Mandarin Chinese dialects. And from these dialects, the Beijing variant, also the modern standard language is derived. The south of China, on the other hand, is home of various rather distinct fanyan with their own names and identity. Most importantly, Hokkien or Minnan in the Fujian province, Tiaoqiu and Yue and Hakka, and in the north of Hakka, Gan in Jiangxi province. The dark green spot on this map is the area where Hakka is spoken, where Hakkas are living. If we look at the administrative subdivisions of China, we see that Hakka does not have a province of its own, but is spoken in the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi and Fujian, dispersing over southwestern areas in Guangxi and Sichuan. For this reason, it is actually difficult to estimate the numbers of Hakkas in China and the world. Considering the available information about the percentage of Hakkas in Chinese provinces, we find the following numbers from which we can see that the majority of the Hakkas live in Guangdong province, with important numbers in Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangxi. Furthermore, there are many Hakkas in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and this would give a number of more than 52 million people already. The Hakkas spread out to over 80 countries worldwide, which is even more difficult to evaluate. The majority of the overseas Hakkas live in Southeast Asia, and are most visible in Malaysia and Indonesia. There are Hakkas in Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, but they are more difficult to count as they are often assimilated to the local culture. The word Hakka, Chinese Kejia, means guest people, which is a somewhat strange name for an ethnic or linguistic group. We have said already that they do not have their own Chinese province, which is the first hint as to why they have this name. Geographically, the Hakkas originally inhabit the mountainous regions between the socio-economic centers of South China, and due to their migrational dispersion, the Hakka language is also a socio-elect of a specific social group. In the homeland of the Hakkas, there is a Hmong minority, the so-called Shur. They used to speak their own language, which is now in use by only very few people. The other 700,000 Shur speak Shoyu, which is a synetic language. This language is very similar to the adjacent Hakka dialects and might be counted among the Hakka language sphere. The origin of the Hakkas is unclear, but it is usually said that they came from the north in various migration waves. The Hakkas seem to have come relatively late in history, that means within the last 1,000 years, which is why they could not settle in already occupied areas such as the more fertile lowlands. And since the mountains were not fertile, Hakka men were rather mobile and went to work in the economic centers of Guangdong, often leaving the farm to the women. Many ultimately migrated westwards with their families. The name Hakka may be explainable from the fact that the late arriving Hakkas often rented land from landowners, which means they were not owners themselves, and therefore were considered to be only guests. A number of historically events which we cannot elaborate here led to frictions between the Bundi or Cantonese and the Hakkas, which led to outright violence and even war. The large characteristic Hakka roundhouses with only very few openings to the outside appear like defensive fortresses for a reason. It is said that these ongoing conflicts actually created the Hakka identity. They were a shunned outgroup, which over time, due to this outgroup feeling developed self-consciousness as a group. It goes without saying that therefore people in some other areas, for instance in Jiangxi, may not identify themselves as Hakka, but speak a related variety which should be included linguistically in Hakka language research. The Hakkas see themselves as hard-working, diligent, clan-oriented people who keep close contact with their group and collaborate as a group. The women are able to work hard in the fields because they traditionally did not bind their feet. Because of their delicate situation among the other groups in the region with no province on their own, Hakkas seem to have always taken care to cultivate a double identity as Hakkas and as Han Chinese. And this loyalty to China led to many Hakkas playing important roles in politics. Beside the above mentioned round houses, Hakkas are routinely known for the so-called Hakka Mountain Songs, a custom which previously served as a means of communication between the mountain hills. The Hakkas partly have their own cultural traditions. In Sinkawang, Indonesia, the Hakka Chinese Chapgome Festival on the 15th day of the Chinese New Year attracts many tourists. It has become a prominent cultural event. The Hakkas are one of the larger immigration groups from China. Most Hakkas moved to Taiwan and Southeast Asia, but also spread worldwide, for instance, to Suriname. Hakkas who emigrated early in history, often mixed with local populations and developed distinct cultures and sometimes Creoles or mixed languages. The Peranakan in Malaysian Indonesia or the Hakkas of Banka Belitung Islands are examples for that. Hakkas were very good at land reclamation and their close group practices helped create administrative structures. They were miners and cultivators of borderlands and they connected the political powers at the coastline with the native people in the jungle. But let us turn towards the language now. A language of 50 plus million speakers has dialects of its own. Being a non-standardized language, we can assume there is a dialect continuum without the center. Conventionally, Meixian is nowadays considered to be the cradle of Hakka language. It is a de facto standard. Hakka being dispersed into Guangdong and Guangxi, many speakers may be proficient in Cantonese or may have given up Hakka altogether. It is known from Hong Kong and Macao that only old people still speak Hakka today. The Zenithic languages in China could be compared to Romance languages insofar as both groups derived from one imperial language and then diverged. It is therefore interesting to compare the various languages to each other, which is relatively easy to do in the multilingual situation of Malaysia. The following is a translation of a sentence into Malaysian English, Hakka, Cantonese, Hokkien and Malaysian Chinese. It contains a loanword from Malaysian, Hutan. In English, it contains a loanword from Cantonese, Japvodim. When English speakers would say, last time we go to Japvodim by Dingsha, Kenodangwan. This would be in Hakka, Kyu by Ngad Yohi, Japvodiam, Meidungsi, Hei yute to Dange. And very similar in Cantonese or Hokkien or in Malaysian Mandarin, which is influenced by the South Zenithic substrates. Yiqian, Women Cha Cha Huo Dian, Meidungsi, Siyou de Udang de. As in other parts of the world, the first to work on the grammar were missionaries learning the local languages. Before all, the Basel mission was working on Hakka dictionaries and grammatical notes, as well as Christian translations. In modern linguistics, the first grammatical description was made by Hashimoto in 1973 on the basis of one Malaysian speaker. In 1993, a Chinese scholar, He Gongyong, wrote a Hakka grammar in Chinese language. Otherwise, Hakka is of interest for historical linguistics of Chinese. Instead of going through phoneme tables and so on, let us just get the feeling for the pronunciation of Hakka. Let's read these few sentences and compare them to standard Chinese. One of the most striking phonological features of Hakka is the existence of kouda consonants, which are altogether absent in northern Chinese. One can certainly establish phonological correlations between standard Chinese and Hakka. So, lai is loi, and yao is oi, and ai is oi, for instance. And he is ho, and gege is agor. And sometimes there are different lexemes as schwo and gong. There are eight tones in Hakka. Two are called checked tones, and they are related to these kouda consonants. Again, it makes no sense to give the system here because it diverges between the dialects. In the romanization of Hakka, numbers are usually used to represent the tone contours on a scale from one for lo to five for high. Let us discuss a few grammatical aspects, not systematically, but in a few selected examples. Word formation is certainly very similar to other synetic languages. For instance, the suffix ga is the Chinese jia, is a derivation for agentive nouns, yīng yǐn hókka, the linguist, yǐ yǐn shué jia. Similarly, xīn zhāng and xīn shāng are the same word, distinguished only by phonology. There are the usual complex rules for reduplication, but one more peculiar feature is the reduplication of meaningless syllables following a noun and giving a special meaning to this noun. So gyok gyak yā means spreading legs widely, or muk mī mi means looking with eyes half closed. Many differences come more from usage habits. If, for instance, one would translate, I am a teacher, Chinese washu laoshi, into Hakka, one can perfectly say nǎi hei xīn zhāng. However, Hakka speakers would more often say nǎi hei gausu ge. I am teach book one. And this gausu, of course, correlates to Chinese jiaoshu and is known in Chinese as well. The construction hei and ge is structurally similar to the Chinese structure shì de. One can test it with other instances, I am a car seller, nǎi hei mai tāi, I am a taxi driver, he is a taxi driver, gi hei su dexie, and so on. Gendered suffixes. This is one other peculiar feature of Hakka, which the speakers are conscious of. The gendered suffixes for nouns, gung means male, ma and po means female. This works quite well in order to distinguish the sex of animals, for instance rooster and chicken, cows and bulls and so on. But it doesn't really make sense with Hakung for prawn, but kiam tzu po for toad. Body parts also receive such suffixes, nǐ gung de ir is male, but zēt ma the tang is female. Nǐngu de breast is male. And then words such as thunder and sky are male, but knife and ladle are female. Let us keep in mind the two last words, wok ma the wok is female, and vōng gung the bowl is male. Chiu 2006 wrote an article about the meanings of these suffixes, and she comes up with the explanation that ma is used for soft, sunken hollow objects, and things people cannot see which are implicit. So for instance wok ma the wok remains in the kitchen, but vōng gung goes to the dining table and is male. Male is the opposite, then for upright things, protruding objects, something people can see, something which is explicit. Ma can also stand for small things and gung for big things. There are even more uses of these suffixes which we cannot describe here. The personal pronouns of Hakka are as follows, ngāi, ngī, gī, ngād yungin, ngīd yungin, gīd yungin. There is no differentiation between inclusive and exclusive plural. The possessive pronouns have slightly different forms, ngā, ngia, gia. They can be followed by a ge, which is the equivalent of the. It can be ngāge or ngāe. The basic syntactic word order is subject verb object, and there is optionality of all components if they can be implied. So let us read a few simple sentences. ngīhyāu gong haka fa mau ngāi ngīhyāu gong haka fa yīsī yīsī yao gīgī Many aspects of grammar are similar in the synodic languages. So we also find topic prominence where a topicalized element can be moved to the front of the sentence. Hakka sentence mun fung chui hi bang bang gung The door, the wind blew made bang bang sound. Or gīm zài à bòi zu thòi yītong cha bungi gīm zài à bòi bòi the car give him. If we try to establish possible differences between standard Chinese and Hakka, it might be interesting to look at the Ba construction, which is much discussed in Chinese grammar, and which puts the object before the verb with the help of the covert Ba when the object is clearly referenced. So it is somewhat similar to differential object marking, depending, however, on difficult to characterize constraints. Give me the phone in Chinese would be Ba shō ji ge wo but in Hakka it is only den fa bòu ngāi without the Ba. If we try to translate Ba chō xi gan jīng, so wash the car, in Hakka it is And here we see there is obligatory demonstrative in front of car, and there is a placeholder pronoun at the end of the sentence where the object usually should be. In Malaysian Mandarin, which is influenced by self-synetic, the sentence can be ke xi gan jīng da, so the da is a copy of the structure. If we use another example, Ba chō xi mai la, sell the car, this again in Hakka is a cha mai hoi gi, but there are alternatives such as cha na loi mai hoi gi with serial verbs. Or to read the following full sentence, lau fu cha mai hoi ngāi dio oito ba ta. Here the demonstrative and the placeholder pronoun are missing now. And ta can simply be put between subject and verb. Ba ta of course is a blend between English bus and Hakka ka. This example is from Malaysian Hakka. It turns out there are more co-verbs which can have partially the functions expressed by Ba, for instance that, or lau, or jiōng. And jiōng leads us back to the Ba construction because Chinese jiāng can actually replace Ba in formal writing. Therefore might be considered more elegant, more archaic, older. Let us look at data in Malaysia. An old lady said, ngāi dio oi jiōng aba atzak cao pai guā gao gao. So we want the father's signboard heng hai using jiōng. In sabahan Hakka, in sabah, we find bongi kebin gōn yim which is help you relate to guanyin which means you relate, or for you relate to guanyin. Kebin yuk wong tai di. You know, somehow gōn yim lau ngāi kao yu yin lau. Lau in this case has the usual meaning of with and not of ba. ngā ma jiō jiōng ngāi hi kebin gōn yim lau. My mother related me to guanyin. That is a ba function. And in sin kā wang, we got another verb in another Hakka dialect. ngā lo gōng gāk ngāi mō fīt kīc yō liāo. So my husband gāk my motorbike rode. Speaking of ba, maybe we can speak of the bay construction which is called a passive in Chinese. There is no bay in Hakka but bun to give can play that role additionally to the functions that gāi or bun already has. He in his grammar gives the example sam bun gi ta lan lau. So shirt give hi torn. Shirt by him torn. But often this bun construction can be omitted. Gia tsā mai hoi his car sold. Otherwise bun has a number of functions. Trying to translate the ba sentence in Indonesia led to a passive construction. Wo ba tā du shu nong bu jian lau was the input sentence. I lost his book and the answer was gia shu bun ngaim jian jian. So his book by me make not see. This sentence could be rendered as ngaichin ngen gia shu hoi which would be the active construction without any special marking. In response to the ongoing discriminations of old the foundation of the Tsung-Tin Association in Hong Kong marked the beginning of Hakka self-awareness of fighting back. Overseas Hakkas are often organized in so called hui guan or clan associations and in many places also there are Tsung-Tin associations. These associations reflect the collaborative spirit of the Hakkas. Furthermore there are by annual World Hakka Conferences which bring together Hakkas from all over the world to foster the cooperation and friendship globally. The Hakkas outside of China find themselves in various multilingual situations with other scenitic varieties and with other languages. In Malaysia Hakkas speakers usually also speak some Cantonese possibly Hokkien English, Standard Chinese and Malaysian. This leads to many interferences between these languages through borrowing code switching and structural convergence. In the following example an English dialogue of Hakka speakers turns into a word play where a Hakka word cing-tai whatever is deliberately wrongfully interpreted by a similar Chinese word cing-tai vegetables. What do you want to drink? Cing-tai laa Here got no cing-tai. Here got kopi tea or juice. You want cing-tai you go to bazar. In this example the Hakka speaker while explaining the hardships of his family to learn standard probably written Chinese all by themselves he switches to Chinese whenever mentioning the learning effort. Ki hee ga gi hok tsui shue de nai chi ga hee an yong shia laa dan hee gia jiu han nu li de shi shi The green part is standard Chinese Malaysian Chinese of course. Finally in the last sentence in 35 we find a Hakka sentence with two loan words one from Malaysian English He has been detained by the police. Please also note the passive construction with bun which we just have described previously. In some places Hakka is extraordinarily strong. For instance in Sabah Hakka is the lingua franca of the region that is other people are also learning the language. The first migrants were men and they could not bring Hakka wives with them. Inter-ethnic marriages between Hakkas and local people led to the formation of a new ethnic group the Sino-Kadasan a mix between Hakkas and Kadazanduzun people often speaking Hakka and following Chinese customs. Sinkawang in the west on the Indonesian side is majoritarily a Hakka town. The Hakkas the local Dayak people and the Malays form a unique culture which is called Qidayu an acronym for China Dayak and Malayu or sometimes Qidayu for the Sinitic Qionhua for Chinese Dayak and Malayu. The Hakkas speak Hakka and Indonesian. Standard Chinese is introduced only slowly in these days. The Hakka language has many Indonesian loan words. In Taiwan Hakkas make approximately 15% of the population. The Hakka basic law recognizes Hakka as one of the national languages and it is used in public announcements it is taught in schools and it is promoted at many levels. There are also Hakkas in Taiwan who have a more complex background. For instance this rather old consultant was born in Meixian came to Burma as a young boy and much later in life moved to Taiwan where he is still running his shop to this day. These Burmese Chinese have their own quarter in Taipei. Hakkas in Europe partly come from other countries than China. For instance the Hakkas in the Netherlands are from Suriname, Indonesia also from Hong Kong and Guangdong province. The largest group of Hakkas in Vienna comes from Calcutta in India. Their group is now split up between Calcutta Vienna and Toronto and they meet each other in India which is their homeland. The Indian Hakkas of Austria work together in Chinese restaurants all their life so that the older first generation migrants do not even speak much German. As a minority language Hakka is experiencing language change through influences from other languages and language shift. That means the language is in the youngest generation. In Taiwan for instance in spite of the promotion of the language the Hakkas use more Chinese than Hakka. In this example a mother explains how she taught her child to speak Hakka and understand Hakka and she said literally Because I speak Chinese I speak Chinese I speak Chinese I don't understand and so on. As we can see she uses both Hakka and standard Chinese and she uses this code switching quite creatively by playing her role as a Hakka speaker and the not understanding part by her child. The young Hakka teenagers in Vienna are quite good at speaking Hakka because Hakka is their family language and they grew up speaking Hakka but certainly German is their stronger language and they are to be considered weak speakers. So to come to conclusions Hakka is interesting for historical linguistics because it is less innovative than Mandarin and therefore gives us certain glimpses to older versions of Chinese. Hakka is as such a non-standard language it has not been standardized as such and therefore we find a dialect continuum with a lot of variation and at the same time it is under the influence of standard languages everywhere. In China it is under the increasing influence of Putankwa in other places it may be influenced by local national languages. This seems to lead to rapid language change through borrowing code switching conversions of patterns and it seems to be no longer learned as a first language by the youth in most parts of the world. So we must expect that language shift is imminent and that Hakka like all non-standard languages might be replaced by the various the respective standard languages. We would like to finish with a photo with dictionary author Chin Aweng, a Surinamese now Dutch Hakka who spent 20 years of his life in the Paila Hakka dictionary in order to preserve the memory of the language which is now much less used by the younger generation. Thank you very much for listening we hope you found it interesting.