Hakka Culture and Language

30-second overview: In 1988, nearly ten thousand Hakka people took to the streets of Taipei carrying a photo of "Sun Yat-sen wearing a mask," protesting the Broadcasting Act's prohibition on dialect broadcasts. Thirty-eight years later, Hakka has become a national language — but fewer people can actually speak it than ever. Of the 4.669 million who identify as Hakka, only 38.3% can still speak the language. This article is not merely about one ethnic group's culture; it is about a three-hundred-year survival experiment: how a people branded "hard-necked" (stubbornly unyielding) developed Taiwan's most resilient cultural tenacity while repeatedly forced to adapt throughout history.

On the afternoon of December 28, 1988, Professor Chiu Jung-chu of National Taiwan University walked at the front of a procession, holding a deliberately altered photograph — the founding father Sun Yat-sen, with a white surgical mask Photoshopped over his mouth.¹ Sun Yat-sen was Hakka, but had he been alive in Taiwan at that time, he would not have been permitted to speak Hakka on television. Article 20 of the Broadcasting Act explicitly limited the broadcast ratio of "dialects," and Hakka-language programming was essentially nonexistent.

This was no ordinary march. The procession set out from the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and ended at the Legislative Yuan, with nearly ten thousand people along the way chanting "Return Our Mother Tongue."² The original organizers had named the movement "Return Our Hakka Language," but Chiu insisted on changing it to "Return Our Mother Tongue" — fighting not just for Hakka rights, but for space for all silenced languages. That renaming transformed the movement from ethnic mobilization into a declaration of linguistic human rights.

Five years later, Article 20 of the Broadcasting Act was deleted. Ten years after that, Hakka Television launched. Fifteen years after that, Hakka formally became a national language. From street to legislature: thirty years. But the story does not end there.

"Hard-Neck": How an Insult Became an Ethnic Badge

In Hakka families, calling a child "hard-necked" (硬頸, ngiang-kiang) is absolutely not a compliment. "Kia he dong ngiang-kiang ge xi nin" — he's an inflexible child. This was everyday parental scolding, carrying the tone of "why are you so stubborn?"

But after the 1988 Return Our Mother Tongue movement, Hakka intellectuals began inverting the word's meaning. They said "hard-neck" was not stubbornness — it was principled persistence, fearlessness in the face of power.³ The 2000 presidential election pushed this inversion to its extreme. All three sets of candidates rushed to Hakka communities and competed to invoke "the hard-neck spirit" in campaign speeches. A household insult was, within twelve years, transformed into a political accolade.

The semantic reversal of "hard-neck" is more than a linguistic phenomenon. It maps how a marginalized ethnic group, in the course of Taiwan's democratization, reclaimed the power to name itself.

Anthropologists are not entirely convinced. They worry that defining an entire people by a single trait is reductive — as if Hakka people were nothing other than "stubborn." Supporters counter: in a multiethnic society, you need a flag, and "hard-neck" is that flag. The debate itself is a microcosm of the Hakka's modern predicament: how much simplification does it take to be seen, and how much resistance is needed to avoid being misunderstood?

Liudui: A Democratic Experiment Running for Three Hundred Years

To understand where Hakka resilience comes from, you have to turn back three hundred years, to the Pingtung Plain.

In 1721, Chu Yi-kuei rose against the Qing in Taiwan. Rather than wait for imperial troops, the Hakka settlers of the Pingtung Plain organized their own armed self-defense — the origin of "Liudui" (六堆, literally "Six Camps").⁴ The six camps were distributed across what is now Meinong in Kaohsiung and Neipu, Wanluan, Zhutian, Changzhi, and Xinpi in Pingtung. Their members came from Chaozhou and Huizhou in Guangdong and Tingzhou in Fujian — different ancestral origins, but united by a shared language. Language preceded bloodline; culture transcended geography. This identity model was established three hundred years ago.

What made Liudui truly remarkable was not its military capacity but its governance. In each crisis, the camps elected a grand commander and deputy commanders, making collective decisions. From the Chu Yi-kuei uprising of the Kangxi era to the Yiwei War of 1895 (乙未戰爭), Liudui elected ten successive leaderships, each driven by crisis and serving as temporary democracy. When the emergency ended, the leaders returned to farming. No tenure for life, no hereditary succession — in eighteenth-century East Asia, a second example of this is almost impossible to find.

After the Chu Yi-kuei uprising was suppressed, the Qing court built the Loyal Righteousness Shrine (忠義亭, later renamed 忠義祠) in Zhutian to commemorate the Hakka militiamen.⁵ Three hundred years later, the shrine remains the spiritual center of Liudui Hakka. Every autumn at the Loyal Righteousness Shrine Festival, Liudui descendants return from across Taiwan to Pingtung, standing on the ground where their ancestors took their oath, reciting the ritual texts in Hakka. For them, this is not a tourist event — it is a rite of confirming that they still remember where they came from.

Four Accents, Seven Tones: A Museum of Language

Taiwan's Hakka is divided into four major accents, each preserving traces of Old Chinese from different historical periods. The Sixian accent (四縣腔), spoken by about 60% of users, has a soft sound and serves as the standard language of Hakka Television. The Hailu accent (海陸腔), spoken by about 30%, is high-pitched and preserves seven tones — three more than Mandarin. The Dapu accent (大埔腔) is concentrated in Dongshi, Taichung, while the Raoping accent (饒平腔) is scattered in Xinwu, Taoyuan; together these two account for less than 10% and are already on the verge of extinction.⁶

The same character can have completely opposite tones in Sixian and Hailu. Hakka people often joke: "When a Sixian person talks to a Hailu person, it's like one person going uphill and the other going downhill." This tonal richness is not merely a linguistic curiosity — it is the foundation of Hakka mountain songs (山歌). Because the language itself is music, the relationship between lyrics and melody in Hakka mountain songs is closer than in any other Chinese folk song tradition; the tone of each character directly determines the direction of the melody.

But no matter how rich the tones, a language with no speakers is a dead language.

The Numbers Don't Lie: A Disappearance in Slow Motion

The 2021 National Hakka Population and Language Survey published by the Hakka Affairs Council showed cold numbers: 4.669 million people identified as Hakka (19.8% of the national population), an increase of 132,000 over 2016 — identification was rising. But Hakka listening comprehension dropped from 64.3% to 56.4%, and speaking ability from 46.8% to 38.3%.⁷ In plain terms: fewer than two in five self-identified Hakka people can still speak Hakka.

The geographic distribution is even more stark. In officially designated "Hakka Cultural Priority Development Zones" (Meinong, Beipu, Dongshi — traditional Hakka townships), Hakka usage rates remain relatively stable. But outside these zones — among urban Hakka in Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung — listening and speaking ability plummeted by about 15 percentage points. Urbanization is not gradually diluting Hakka; it is causing entire segments of it to evaporate.

The mechanism of language loss is both cruel and simple: parents find it easier to speak Mandarin at home, so children grow up not knowing Hakka; those children are even less likely to speak Hakka to their own children. Skip one generation, and the chain is broken. Linguists estimate Hakka is losing speakers at more than 1% per year, and its overall vitality rating has reached "severely endangered."

But the 2021 survey contained a seed of reversal: among 13- to 18-year-olds, Hakka listening comprehension rose from 12.3% to 18.6%.⁸ This is the first uptick seen in younger generations after twenty years of mother-tongue education policy — not a reversal, just stanching the bleeding. But on a persistently declining curve, any upward inflection deserves attention.

Lin Sheng-xiang's Wolf 125: When Hakka Became Rock

In 1994, a young man from Meinong rode a Wolf 125 motorcycle to Zhong Yung-feng's door with NT$100,000 he had earned with his self-organized band "Guanzi Music Pit" (觀子音樂坑), saying he wanted to donate it to the anti-reservoir movement. Zhong later recalled that what he saw was a young man "with a certain passionate sense of responsibility toward his hometown."⁹

That young man was Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥). Four years later, he formally collaborated with poet Zhong Yung-feng, creating a debut album about Meinong's fight against the reservoir, "We Sing Mountain Songs" (我等就來唱山歌), singing agricultural fury in Hakka outside the Legislative Yuan — and unexpectedly winning two Golden Melody Awards. In 2001, the Shanlin River Band's (交工樂隊) "March of the Chrysanthemums" (菊花夜行軍) wove the realities of rural life in the 1990s — pesticides, foreign spouses, land loss — into a Hakka rock epic through the story of returning youth "A-cheng."¹⁰

Zhong Yung-feng's method of writing lyrics was earthy: "Writing lyrics is like farming — you have to prepare the ground first, observe the weather and the market. Relying on inspiration is the worst approach." This explains why their Hakka songs are not nostalgic but documentary. Every word grew out of fieldwork, not romantic imagination.

Lin Sheng-xiang and Zhong Yung-feng proved one thing: Hakka doesn't need to be "preserved" in a museum — it can be rock, protest, the language of contemporary art. A dialect is not past tense; it is another kind of present tense.

In 2007, the Golden Melody Awards established a Best Hakka Singer award, and musicians like Lo Szu-jung (羅思容), Huang Lien-yu (黃連煜), and Missa continued making music in Hakka that crosses ethnic boundaries. These works attract not just Hakka listeners — many in the audience don't understand the lyrics at all, yet are moved by the melody and emotion. The path of cultural transmission broadened from "transmission by bloodline" to "propagation through aesthetics."

Salty, Rich, Fragrant: Memory Written by Labor into Taste

The core logic of Hakka cuisine is three words: salty (鹹), rich (肥), fragrant (香). This is not a flavor preference; it is a survival strategy carved into food by the heavy labor of mountain life. The robust saltiness of Hakka stir-fry replenishes salt lost through sweating; the pickling of dried mustard greens braised pork (梅菜扣肉) is a preservation method from the era before refrigerators; ground tea (擂茶) pounds tea leaves, sesame, and peanuts into a high-density energy drink. The pestle grinding in the mortar for thirty to forty minutes is typically done by the most experienced women in the household, whose wrist strength determines the texture of the result.

Modern Hakka restaurants have substantially adapted these dishes: reduced oil and salt, enhanced presentation. Some call this progress; others call it betrayal. But the most interesting thing about Hakka cuisine is not the debate over flavor — it is how food has become a code for ethnic recognition. If you eat a plate of Hakka stir-fry in Taipei and the saltiness is right, you know the owner is one of your own. Taste resists the diluting effects of urbanization more than language does, which may be why Hakka food culture has proven more resilient than the Hakka language itself.

From the Communal Courtyard to the Cultural Park: A Spatial Metaphor

The traditional Hakka dwelling, the "hokfong-house" (伙房屋), is a spatial declaration of collectivism: the main hall at the center for ancestor worship, left and right wings for living quarters, a shared courtyard. The Guo family hokfong-house in Beipu, Hsinchu, built in 1910, has three bays and three wings; more than fifty people still live there today. Qing-era hokfong-houses featured gun ports and watchtowers, with walls thick as a fort — not because Hakka people were warlike, but because they were always making a life on someone else's land.

The Liudui Hakka Cultural Park in Pingtung, opened in 2011, reinterpreted Hakka space in modern architectural terms: open, transparent, welcoming to outsiders. From the closed fortress to the open park — that trajectory itself is a condensed image of three hundred years of Hakka cultural experience: from defense to display, from survival to confidence.

The Living Question

The core question facing Hakka culture has only one version, and no one dares give an answer: Is Hakka culture without the Hakka language still Hakka culture?

Some say language is the soul — lose the language, lose everything. Others say culture's core lies in values and ways of life, and language is just one of its carriers. Hakka people themselves give the most pragmatic answer: don't give up either side; save what can be saved.

The 13-to-18-year-old listening comprehension rise of 6.3 percentage points in the 2021 survey is evidence of "save what can be saved." Not through slogans, but through a few classes of mother-tongue education per week in schools, teaching the language back one word at a time. The progress is slow. But the people who marched through the streets thirty-eight years ago holding that photo of Sun Yat-sen in a mask were never asking for an overnight miracle.

They were asking for a chance for the next generation to still be able to open their mouths and speak.

Further reading:

• Taiwan Hakka Music — From mountain songs to rock, how Hakka music became the frontline of ethnic revitalization
• Hakka Food Culture — The geography and labor history behind "salty, rich, fragrant"
• Linguistic Diversity and Mother-Tongue Culture — A panorama of Taiwan's multilingual environment and the mother-tongue situations of all ethnic groups
• Ethnic Groups (Hoklo, Hakka, Indigenous, Mainlander, New Immigrant) — The interactions of Taiwan's five major groups and contemporary ethnic politics
• Taiwan's Democratic Transition — The full arc of democratization within which the Return Our Mother Tongue movement took place

References