Hakka Language

Hakka language, Chinese language spoken by considerably fewer than the estimated 80 million Hakka people living mainly in eastern and northern Guangdong province but also in Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Hunan, and Sichuan provinces. Hakka is also spoken by perhaps 7 million immigrants in widely scattered areas, notably Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The best-known dialect is the Hakka of Mei county (now in Meizhou), in Guangdong, which has the same initial and final consonants and the same syllabic nasal sounds (nasals that function as vowels) as standard Cantonese but has a vowel system resembling that of Modern Standard Chinese. Hakka, like Cantonese, has six tones to distinguish meaning between words or word elements with the same series of consonants and vowels. Hakka also has many similarities with the Gan language, and, the two languages are sometimes classified as a single subgroup, Gan-Hakka languages. Both have borrowed many words from Cantonese.