The first written account of English coming into contact with Cantonese was recorded by Peter Mundy in Macau in 1637 (Bolton, 2002). Since the late nineteenth century, English has remained as a strong influence in the region.
After the Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories were ceded on an indefinite basis to Britain, on a 99-year lease term respectively, the status of Cantonese remained as a language only spoken by the locals. During the
status gradually gained attention when the colonial government began to promote the English language to its Cantonese-speaking locals in their education policy (Pennington & Yue, 1994). Even though Cantonese is considered as the lingua franca of Hong Kong, the prominent position of English cannot be ignored.
Lord (1987) observed the status of English in Hong Kong back in the 1980s:
In Hong Kong… English has changed from being a purely colonial language whose use was largely, restricted to government circles, the law, high-level business, and a few other sectors, to becoming an indispensable language of wider communication, for a growingly large range of people, all the way down from top brass to clerks, from taipans to secretaries. This latter local trend has been strictly a function of the growth of Hong Kong, especially during the 1970s, as a major international trading, business, banking, and communications centre. (p. 11)
In 1987, the government implemented a compulsory nine-year free education policy as an education reform, aiming to provide accessible education for children11. Because the policy was successful in improving the literacy rate, the government extended the free education policy to 12 years12, and is in talks of further extending it to provide an optional free pre-school. It seemed that
11 The nine-year compulsory education policy was enforced since September 1987, where parents have to enroll their children to attend primary school for six years of primary school (P.1 to P.6) to the first three years of secondary school (S.1 to S.3).
12 The government had an education reform, extending its compulsory free education policy to twelve years, covering both primary and secondary school (P.1 to P.6; S.1 to S.6) when students attend government-aided schools (private and international institutes are not included in this scheme).
English shares equal status within the society. The importance of English in Hong Kong’s education system has remained even to this day – at secondary and tertiary level, English is still wildly used as a teaching medium (Pennington &
Yue, 1994).
Linguistic Phenomena in Hong Kong
Walking down the streets of Hong Kong, it can be observed that during day-to-day conversations amongst the local people, it is not uncommon to hear English words being used in a Cantonese-dominated sentence. Such a phenomenon can be described as ‘code-mixing’ or ‘code-switching’ – a type of sociolinguistic behaviour in which two grammatically different languages are juxtaposed within a phrase or sentence (Li, 2000).
English, being the dominant language of the world, has traditionally been used as a tool to judge the society’s level of education, literacy rate, and social status. It has become a norm, even a habit for people in Hong Kong to use English words and phrases when they communicate, not only to fill the lexical or stylistic gap in Cantonese, it is also done as a way of displaying their knowledge of the language, in attempt to raise their social status (Valentini, 2014; Wakefield, 2018). It is interesting to note that code-switching only happens between Cantonese and English, and not Mandarin. It may be due to the fact that Cantonese and Mandarin are two similar languages grammatically and lexically.
Moreover, code-mixing is especially evident in the younger generation, who had been through the nine- and twelve-year compulsory education with English
included as a compulsory subject. It is also popular for schools to use English as a medium of teaching, in the primary to tertiary institutes.
Another linguistic phenomenon commonly seen in Hong Kong Cantonese is the use of loanwords. Hong Kong has had a long history of being in contact with European countries along with their language through trading, resulting in their mutual influences and enriching the languages (Bauer, 1984). One of the most noticeable influences is the mutual exchange of vocabulary – under British sovereignty, Cantonese has adapted many English words to its sound system to enrich its vocabulary and to fill the lexical gap between the two languages. It should also be noted that although English loanwords are frequently used in Hong Kong Cantonese, many have not fully integrated into the language, meaning that quite a few of them have yet to have their designated written standard Cantonese form (Liu, 1977; Wakefield, 2018). Not only in Hong Kong, the use of loanwords is also commonly seen in Japanese and Korean, where English words are adapted to the languages using their sound systems. English has also adapted vocabularies from many languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, French, etc.
Code-switching and loanwords are inevitable when one language comes into contact with another. Hong Kong is only one of the many that has inherited these habits of speech, making Hong Kong Cantonese uniquely different to the ones spoken outside of Hong Kong13.
13 The issue of code-mixing and English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese received scholarly attention since the late 1970s, however, since it is not the main focus of this dissertation, the discussion is kept to a moderation amount.