For the first 300 yrs of Sino settlement in TW, foot-binding was THE marker btw Hakka and Hoklo. Meanwhile, dialect differences were the marker in bloody feuds btw Hoklos from different parts of Hoklistan.when we say the people in certain area were/are Cantonese or Min/Hokloid etc, was/is the language the sole determinant of that identity?
I would say these kind of splits and oppositions were probably less marked in places where the tribes had come up together through time. Even in TW, there were places where Hoklos had stopped binding feet long before Japanese colonization. These were all in areas on the outskirts of Hakka country. http://blog.pixnet.net/Richter
All this recent stuff. It could get more interesting going back in time.
Religion is probably also a marker. Also livelihood. Also length of history in a given area. Poss. also looks, at one pt.
One way to answer this question is to dive into old-time works of scholarship. Another would be to visit the modern-day contact regions -- and there are many.How different was (& is) Min/Hokloid people from Cantonese & Hakka (also Kadai/Hmong etc), other than the language used?
From TW, the data shows that nowadays, the avg foreign bride in Hoklo-dominant areas is Vietnamese, while she's Indonesian (Hakka) in some Hakka towns and PRC Chinese in places with concentrations of working-class ROC 49ers. http://blog.pixnet.net/Richter
Anecdotally, it all seems to fit to a tee. There is a natural, "tropical" flamboyance that the Hoklo Creoles (the "Tâi'oân lâng") and the (Southern) Vietnamese share ... which is a turn-off for the austere Hakka and the "modern-minded" 49ers.
Hakka and 49ers alike consider the Hoklo Creoles to be dirty, clannish, uncouth, lawless, unreliable, etc. Meanwhile, Creoles consider 49ers to be somewhat cold and distant...
The Straits stereotypes are probably well-known here too... But the "Chinese" identity trumps all in the Straits.
A Hakka taxi driver in KL told me that Hakka never let go of their ties to the motherland -- unlike Hokkiens and Teochews, who feel a deeper tie to their new home. This makes so much sense -- look at how entrenched and "ingrained" the Teochews are in central and eastern Thailand, Cambodia, and southern VN, country as well as city; look at Taiwanese Independence, a Hoklo movement; look at the Indonesian Hakka girls marrying Taiwanese Hakka, something that Teochews and Hokkiens in diaspora just would not go so far out of their way to do.
There are lots of Luiciu folk in the Pearl Delta, and from what they say about themselves, they sound much like country Creole Taiwanese: clannish and heavy on the 義.
It would be interesting to get around Luiciu, Hainam, and southern Kwongsai. This is a contact region to the bone. In northern Hainam there are entire counties made up mostly of an almost completely Sinicized group that speaks a heavily Sinicized Kadai language. The majority on the island is "Hokloid", but there are also groups speaking "unidentified Sinitic languages", most notably 儋州, once again the dominant language in its county.
Last, 19th century European travelers came up with some great insights, some of them not their own but, rather, things that everyone knew back then but that Chinese scholars might not've bothered to put on paper. For example, laborers in Hawai'i sourced out of Amoy were more belligerent than the ones from Canton. Or that Teochews were much more "fond of strangers" than Hokkiens despite the linguistic similarities. My personal experience bears this out too -- Teochew strangers are usually much friendlier than Hokkiens; Hokkiens need an introduction from a mutual friend, etc. I would add that Penang Hokkiens and country Creole Taiwanese are an exception to this rule, poss. b/c of their campuran with Teochews and "asli" Taiwanese, respectively.
I echo Ah-bin's answer... I would add (although Ah-bin may or may not agree) that we should keep in mind that the linguistic situation might've looked real different at any point in the past, esp. way, way back. If modern linguists could take a time machine back to circa 500 AD, they might find many, many languages in tropical and subtropical Pacific Asia that wouldn't fit into any of the language families we know today. Yet the modern historical linguist has to deal with all these possibilities w/o the benefit of time travel and direct evidence.Was Tai-Kadai part of 百越 while Hmong-Mien was not?
Now you are asking a huge question. I would say 百越 referred to the people of a place who shared certain cultural features
So, for example, even a Tai-Kadai loan in Hoklo could've conceivably gotten in indirectly through one or more intermediary languages, and these "middle languages" may or may not have belonged to any of the language families we know today. It's possible that whole language families existed in the past that we don't know about. It's possible that some language died out on a houseboat (think Tanka) one night 120 years ago in a faraway bay on the coast of southern Qing China, which was the last representative of what had been a massive language family at one pt. The pt is that we can't know for sure.
