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Since the 1980s, Hakka new literature, which sprouted in the 1980s, has been developing for more than 30 years. Hakkanese poetry has been one of the genres that has been proliferating. To make Hakkanese be not only colloquial but also literary, it’s important to write it down as much as possible. The biggest problem in the writing of Hakkanese is that it is considered to be spoken but have no character for use. Different poets pick different Chinese characters to write Hakkanese since the writing system of Hakkanese hasn’t yet been standardized. This research aims to sort out different Chinese characters used in Hakkanese poetry by different authors, to establish a corpus of Hakkanese poetry, and to study the interrelation between Chinese characters and Hakkanese. Hakkanese has long been regarded as one of the varieties of Chinese and lots of writers would make use of Chinese characters to write Hakkanese poems. When running into Hakkanese words unable to be expressed in Chinese characters, they would use substitute Chinese words or invent new characters; however, it has also caused problems. It is found that the same Hakkanese expressions would be represented by different Chinese characters. On the other hand, the same Chinese characters may have multiple meanings. Furthermore, Hakkanese has quite a number of function words unable to be expressed in Chinese characters. The same Chinese character may be picked to stand for different Hakkanese expressions, which may make readers confused. We can see that Chinese characters can’t always fit Hakkanese after a few poems are analyzed. The chaos in the use of Chinese characters won’t benefit the stabilization of the writing system of Hakkanese. To develop the writing system of Hakkanese, fully replying on Chinese characters doesn’t seem a wise strategy. Moreover, it is urgent to carry out language planning for Hakkanese. And Han-romanization mixed script may be a solution. |