Do any of you 中国通s out there know the difference between "Hakka" and "Hokkien" ? If so, please share your knowledge and write as much as you can. Thanks!

Hakka is a bunch of dialects of the Hakka people and Hokkien is a bunch of dialects of the Min people. They are both subgroups of the Han Chinese people. Both languages are descendants of Old Chinese but unlike Mandarin or Cantonese, not of Middle Chinese.

I hear that the Hokkien dialects are generally mutually intelligible; Hakka dialects not so much.

So, the Min people are from Fujian, right? Where are the Hakka people from?

From what I understand, their origin is disputed, but today the bulk of them lives in the border region of Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi in a wide radius around Meizhou. However, small Hakka communities are in various places and have developed their own local Hakka cultures.

For example, I live in a Hakka area in Taiwan. When my roommate's dad, who is half Hong Kong-Hakka, half Singapore-Hakka, came to visit, he said he couldn't understand the local Hakka tongue here.

And here's a map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hakka_in_China.png

this is what I found out from another person:

"Hokkien" is the Hokkien pronunciation of the word "Fujian".

So, I guess it's safe to assume that "Hokkien" is a word referring to dialects of Fujian.

based on the info in this thread, I think we can conclude that there are two separate dialects that are widely spoken in Taiwan:
1. Hokkien， referred to there as 台语
2. Hakka , a language spoken by the Hakka people


I think we've solved the case. Thanks~

Yeah, Hokkien is spoken by some 70% of the population, say the official numbers. But many of my friends don't speak Hokkien despite being ethnically Hoklo; and almost all of my Hokkien-speaking friends say that they only speak Hokkien with their grandparents because they don't understand Mandarin. It's more widely understood in the South, though.
And Hakka is even rarer.

I'd rather conclude that there are three separate dialects that are widely understood in Taiwan, namely

1. Mandarin
2. Hokkien (Taiwanese)
3. Hakka

of which, sad but true, Hokkien and Hakka are borderline irrelevant (and increasingly so) because virtually everybody under 50 speaks Mandarin better than any other language.

Hi Schnabelhung,

now I am have some questions.

So you refer Hokkien as Tawainese? Because I already saw that there are other kinds of Hokkien in other countries (like in Malaysia).

Another thing is that, even in Taiwan I never listened to someone referring to Taiwanese as Hokkien. Like, if you to Hsinchu County or Miaoli County, you will see that different people speak Hakka and Taiwanese (what is clearly two different languages) but even there I never heard someone calling "Taiwanese" as "Hokkien".

What I know is that Hokkien have several branches and maybe (this I don't know, I am supposing) taiwanese is one of these branches.

Yes, Taiwanese is Hokkien! The distinction is just that "Hokkien" is a larger group, and "Taiwanese" is more like a regional variety of Hokkien. And you're right, most Taiwanese people call their language "Taiwanese".

Reasons I can think of:

1. Because, as Bohan said, "Hokkien" means Fujian, and Taiwan is not part of Fujian. Fujian is the origin of the language, but had its own development in Taiwan (e.g. influence from Japanese).

2. Because Taiwanese Hokkien is one of the two prestige dialects of Hokkien； the other being the Amoy （厦門） dialect.

And I'd usually call it "Taiwanese" too because I'm more used to it, but since Bohan started the thread to talk about Hokkien, I just wanted to be consistent with the terms.