Statistics from the 2006 by-census reflects that only 1.1 per cent of the total population in Hong Kong use Hakka as their home language (Hong Kong Government, 2007). This is a substantial decline from the 15.1 per cent of the population who claimed to speak Hakka as their main language in 1911 (Bacon-Shone & Bolton, 1998). This rapid decrease in the use of Hakka is attributed a number of factors which can also be found in societies where there are threats of extinction of minority languages. These factors include education policies in relation to languages, a lack of institutional support for minority languages, increased access to media and schooling in the dominant or official languages, intermarriage between minority and majority language speakers, ethnic affiliation over time and changes in settlement patterns (Chow & Lau, 2001).​
In recent years, there have been more and more researches done in the area of Hakka language. However, these studies are mainly concerned about the Guangdong Hakka speakers and the culture of these people. Not much of the previous scholastic work is related to the Guangxi Hakka speakers whose ancestors originally came from Guangxi.​
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A majority of the members of the community that we based our project on have the Guangxi ancestry. It is interesting to note that the linguistic situation of the Guangxi province is very complex. About one-third of the population speaks Cantonese with its speakers mainly live in the southwestern part of the province. The second most widely spoken language is the Southwest Mandarin ( 西南官話) with speakers of roughly five million out of 36 million of the total population. About one-tenth of the total population speaks Hakka. The area of distribution mostly concentrated near the border of Guangdong. One of the most interesting dialects in Guangxi is Pinghua with more than two million speakers. Pinghua is a very special regional language which was very similar to Putonghua yet quite different from both Putonghua and Cantonese. It is believed to be the oldest Chinese dialect in Guangxi. The rest of the population in Guangxi speaks Xiang, Min and some other languages. Chinese dialects are brought to Guangxi by immigrants in history. The oldest immigrant language should be Pinghua, followed by Mandarin, Cantonese, Xiang, Min and Hakka.