Early Hakka recordings in the Berlin Sound Archive: speaker history and corpus contents

Abstract

The Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin preserves some 30 min of audio recordings documenting the historical usage of the Chinese Hakka dialect. Produced in 1926, these recordings are among the earliest extant audio witnesses to a Chinese language or dialect. This article serves the double purpose of situating the recordings within their historical context of production and offering a preliminary assessment of their linguistic content. The historical contextualisation centres on the personal history of the speaker whose voice was captured in the recordings. Whilst the native speakers collaborating with linguists tended to be ignored in this period, it is possible in this case to identify the speaker by name, and to reconstruct his life story in some detail by utilising archival records of the Basel Mission. The recordings encompass phonetics, morpho-syntax, conversations and basic narratives, thereby reflecting a didactic approach that aligns with the Basel Mission’s dedication to language instruction and documentation.