Title

A Comparative Study of San Hak’s Dialects in Guangdong and Zhejiang, China

Author

Chung-chieh Wu

Genre

Article  

Pages

441-458

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Language

Chinese

Key words

San Hak dialects, Hakka dialects, language contact, comparative method

Abstract

   Huang (1963)’s field research has found that in the mountain area of Feng-huang, which is located in Chao-zhou, Guangdong Province is said to be the source of the minority San Hak. In that area the San Hak people still exist and they speak a kind of Chinese dialect instead of their original mother to ngue. Luo (1980) has pointed out that the dialect they speak is quite close to Hakka. It is a great pity that this unique dialect has been rarely discussed since the 1980’s. We should not only be concerned with Chinese dialects spoken by Han people, but also the ones spoken by minorities. From the language material revealed so far, the Chinese dialect of San Hak has the residual component of their mother tongue, borrowing forms from the adjacent dialects, and the similarity with Hakka is noteworthy. How do these dialects interact? How come San Hak speak the Chinese dialect nowadays instead of their original language? What is the formation process pf this unique dialect? All the above questions wait for answers. Until present we haven’t been able to get enough language data for this dialect except those rare works such as Huang (1963)’s. several villages speaking the dialect around southeastern China’s mountainous area remain untouched. Without fieldwork done by the author so far, we can’t attribute anything to this dialect.

    This essay is going to conduct a result of the survey on the phonology, tonesandhi type, lexicon and grammatical points of the San Hak villages in the countryside of Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces. Some tribes in Hui-dong, another site in Guangdong, San Hak people remain their original language, which is the therefore one of the research objective in the article. Hence, there are also more discussions and comparative studies entailed.