Hakka ( 客家话 ) is a Chinese dialect spoken predominantly in southern China by the Hakka ethnic group and descendants in diaspora throughout East and Southeast Asia and around the world.

The Hakka language has numerous variants or (sub)dialects, spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou provinces, including Hainan island and Taiwan. Hakka is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, Cantonese, Minnan or most significant languages/dialects of China.

Amongst the (sub)variants of Hakka, the Mei county ( 梅县 ) variant of northeast Guangdong has typically been viewed as a prime example of the Hakka language, forming a sort of standard dialect.

The Guangdong Provincial Education Department created an official romanisation of Meixian Hakka dialect in 1960, one of four languages receiving this status in Guangdong.

The Hakka people have their origins in several episodes of migration from northern China into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest. The forebearers of the Hakka came from present-day Henan and Shanxi provinces, and brought with them features of dialects spoken in those areas during that time. (Since then the speech in those regions evolved into dialects of modern Mandarin.) The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants -p -t -k, as are found in other modern southern Chinese dialects, but these have been lost in some northern Mandarin dialects.

Due to the migration of its speakers, the Hakka language may have been influenced by other language areas through which the Hakka-speaking forebears migrated. For instance, common vocabulary are found in Hakka, Min and Cantonese Chinese languages.

The Hakka language has as many regional dialects as there are counties with Hakka speakers in the majority. Surrounding Meixian are the counties of Pingyuan ( 平远 ), Dabu ( 大埔 ), Jiaoling ( 蕉岭 ), XingNing ( 兴宁 ), Wuhua ( 五华 ), and FengShun ( 丰顺 ). Each is said to have its own special phonological points of interest.

Various dialects of Hakka have been written in a number of Latin orthographies, largely for religious purposes, since at least the mid-19th century.

Currently the single largest work in Hakka is the New Testament and Psalms, although that is expected to be surpassed soon by the publication of the Old Testament. These works render Hakka in both romanization and Han characters (including ones unique to Hakka) and are based on the dialects of Taiwanese Hakka speakers.

The popular Le Petit Prince has also been translated into Hakka (2000), specifically the Miaoli dialect of Taiwan (itself a variant of the Sixian dialect). This also was dual-script, albeit using the Tongyong Pinyin scheme.