Early Hakka Corpora Held by the Basel Mission Library: An Introduction

Abstract

This paper gives a brief outline of the Hakka Bibles and other religious or educational books in Hakka held by the Basel Mission Library, translated, edited and published during the 19th century by protestant missionaries of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society. These documents provide us with some very valuable material available for grammatical, phonological or lexical studies of the Hakka colloquial. They also tell us how a Chinese dialect happened to develop (for a limited period though) a written language in Latin script and then in Chinese characters.