Kèjiā

Kejia, or Hakka, is the language of the Hakka people, the guest families whose name records their northern origins, spread across the hills of northeastern Guangdong, southern Jiangxi and southwestern Fujian. Their ancestors left the Central Plains of Henan and Shaanxi in waves of flight beginning with the collapse of the Western Jin around 311.

Linguists place its phonological formation in the Song, 960 to 1279, when Gan-speaking settlers pushed into the She mountains of western Fujian and absorbed much of the native She population. By the middle Ming it had become a distinct branch, the closest sister of Gan, with a possible Hmong-Mien substrate.

The Meixian dialect of Guangdong serves as its standard, and Hakka is written in Chinese characters. Its speech keeps archaic features lost in Mandarin, above all the checked finals -p, -t and -k.