Hong Kong English

This mixed-method (questionnaires and interviews) study investigated the attitudes of teachers of English across different level of institutes in Hong Kong towards HKE; the study includes both local English Teachers (LETs) and Native English Teachers (NETs). By analyzing both qualitative data and quantitative data from 100 questionnaires and 28 individual interviews, it is shown that both NETs and LETs had a generally positive attitude towards HKE although LETs showed a ‘bi-polar attitude’ when it comes to using HKE in class. Results also showed that NETs and LETs had different foci in pronunciation teaching and their teaching may be altered by their attitudes towards HKE. Further research should be done from teachers’ perspective because teachers play an influential role in executing teaching plans; their attitudes towards language may affect their students in long term.

This book systematically examines the linguistic features and socio-cultural issues of ‘Hong Kong English’. The author focuses on authentic data taken from the International Corpus of English (the Hong Kong component) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English to track the ways in which the English language in Hong Kong has been adapted by its users. She also analyses the emergence of new forms and structures in its grammar and discourse. While the phonetic and phonological aspects of this variety of English have been well documented, its grammatical peculiarities and social language use have been hitherto neglected. This book offers original insights into the grammatical and pragmatic/discoursal features of Hong Kong English and will therefore be of interest to those working in fields such as World Englishes and corpus linguistics.

This corpus-based study reports on a quantitative and qualitative account of the use of tag questions in Hong Kong English. About two hundred instances of question tags were extracted from the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-HK). Tag questions are more than nine times as frequent in spoken texts as in written texts. Hong Kong speakers of English tend to use disproportionately more positive-positive tag constructions (e.g., It's pretty, is it?) than native English speakers, yielding a high error rate of tag question production. Is it? is used as a universal question tag. Results concerning pragmatic functions reveal a higher use of 'confirmatory' tags encouraging participation of speakers in conversation. The conclusion discusses possible pedagogical implications of the tendencies of tag questions in Hong Kong English.

This study reports on the result of ethno-linguistic research which aims to investigate whether an emerging form of code-switching among three languages, namely Cantonese, English and Putonghua, exists in Hong Kong. This study follows the research method of Sung (2010) which the author recorded his experiences as a ‘purist’ in Hong Kong: during a three-day experiment - the author employed only Cantonese, English and Putonghua, respectively. Field notes and reflective diaries were used to record the incidents of communication breakdowns resulted from the use of pure-code instead of mixed codes. Because of the recent change in language policy in which Putonghua has placed more important roles in language teaching in Hong Kong, Putonghua has been added into the current study intentionally because Sung (2010) only included Cantonese and English, which largely ignored the fact the Putonghua has become an important part in the linguistic environment of Hong Kong. The difficulties of using only pure-Cantonese, pure-English and pure-Putonghua in Hong Kong will be discussed. Also, I suggest that there exists the code-switching among Cantonese, English and Putonghua in Hong Kong because of the increasing contact with China and the new policy of using Putonghua as the Medium of Instruction (PMI) in some primary schools. Moreover, the present study suggests that the use of pure-code in these languages may hinder communication in Hong Kong. Further studies are needed on code-switching among the three languages within the younger generation of Hongkongers, especially those who attend PMI schools.

The present study is a follow-up study on Chan (2018a) which examined a new code-switching form in Hong Kong called trilingual code-switching. Previous studies on the code-switching in Hong Kong focused mainly on bilingual code-switching between Cantonese and English, yet Chan’s (2018a) ethnolinguistic study suggested that there was a new form of trilingual code-switching among Cantonese, English and Putonghua arisen in Hong Kong because of the increasing contact with mainland China as well as the introduction of Putonghua in the school curriculum. By analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data from sixty university students collected through an online survey, the present study revealed Hongkongers’ view on three language uses, including the use of pure code, bilingual code-switching and trilingual code-switching. The result showed that trilingual code-switching exists in Hong Kong with a low acceptance in Hong Kong. Also, the research showed how bilingual code-switching is linked to a Hong Kong identity.

This paper investigates the frequency of the present perfect (PP) in 20 national varieties of English, many of which have so far rarely been studied from a corpus-linguistic point of view, with data from the 1.9 billion word GloWbE corpus. PP frequency was measured (1) per million words and (2) as a percentage of all past references. Linear regression models were used to determine which of the factors identified in previous research can account for differences in PP frequency across varieties. The results revealed that a major factor is geographic proximity: Varieties spoken in the same region tend to be similar in PP frequency. Other factors such as degree of formality or the classification in Kachru’s Circles Model and Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial English appear to have little or no influence on the frequency of the PP. The paper also discusses other factors that might be influential, such as substrate influence, the heterogeneous superstrate, national identities, and the degree of cultural contact between varieties. Finally, the discussion explores implications for teaching English as a local and as an international language, arguing that norms of English language teaching should depend on the learners’ communicative needs.

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright Abstract Expressions of gratitude often occur as functional lexical chunks such as thanks and thank you (Coulmas, 1981). In this paper, I will focus on the use of such units and longer formulaic sequences of gratitude such as thanks a lot and thank you very much, relying on data from the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-HK). The results show that Hong Kong speakers of English do not employ the wide variety of thanking strategies that has been investigated in previous literature. Their expressions of gratitude are usually brief, with thanks and thank you being the commonest forms of gratitude expression. These forms are frequently used as closing signals; they often constitute a complete turn. Repetitive gratitude formulae and expressions of appreciation of the interlocutors (both in a single turn and across turns) are exceedingly rare, which suggests that the Chinese may be too reserved to express their gratitude openly and explicitly. Responses to an act of thanking seem to be infrequent in ICE-HK and only a few strategies are represented. The paper also considers the pedagogical implications of the way this function can be acquired in a second/foreign language with the help of the corpus findings.

Studies on prepositions in Hong Kong English have focused on syn­ tactic issues, most notably on the constituent structures of different prepositions with five transitive verbs (i.e., enter into, discuss about, return back, stress on and list out). As a result, they have neglected the role of meaning in the choice of prep­ ositions that are associated with these verbs. This paper attempts to provide a convincing semantic explanation of the phenomenon from the theoretical frame­ work of Cognitive Grammar. I will argue that the co­occurrence of particular prep­ ositions with these verbs in Hong Kong English is not completely arbitrary, but is in fact semantically motivated to a considerable degree. All corpus uses of these structures evoke some kind of conceptual overlap between the lexical verb and the preposition. More specifically, a certain facet of the verb's conceptual content corresponds in some evident way to an active zone of the associated preposition. The conclusion considers the implications of a highly schematic constructional schema instantiated by these five verb­preposition constructions as a unit en­ trenched by non­native speakers.

This dissertation argues, according to the theory of interference and first language transfer, that one’s first language will affect the acquisition of any other languages thereafter. The case study of first language Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong acquiring English as a second language, focusing on speech production, has been used to illustrate this argument. 

The previous literature suggested that sociolinguistic and political factors contributed to the shaping of Hong Kong English. Previous researches focused mainly on tonal and stress placement, a factor unique to Chinese acquiring English. Data collection for this dissertation includes recording informants of various linguistic backgrounds reading out a Chinese and an English word list, and collecting relevant personal information with regards to the study.

Through analyzing the English minimal pairs of <knee> - <need> and <moo> - <mood>, this dissertation assesses the second language acquisition theories – Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (Lado) and Speech Learning Model (Flege). This dissertation focuses on voiced dental fricative occurring word-finally in English words, a factor that is absent in Cantonese. Interviews ESL informants, bilingual Cantonese-English informants, and monolingual English informants are analyzed through spectrogram analysis.

This dissertation compares words with word-final voiced dental fricative (CVC) and ones with the absence of such (CV). Through thorough analysis of the research material and the acoustic data, this dissertation found that the speakers of Hong Kong English replace the word-final voiced dental fricative with a glottal stop. However, they have difficulties in determining which position requires a word-final stop, thus hypercorrecting and produce word-final glottal stops both in CV and CVC situations.

Based on the findings of this case study, it can be concluded that the first language Cantonese speakers speaks an inter-language with varying degrees of competency, with few reaching the target language. Second language speakers, however competent and well exposed to the language, still have a few oddities in their pronunciation. It can be observed that all languages a speaker has learnt will affect one another, be it native or acquired.

Through this study, the ESL teachers in Hong Kong can take note of the oddities that HKE speakers produce, in order to raise the success rate of their production. In future study, one can research on the possibility of devoicing and aspiration in stops.

One of the main goals of the OED's revision project is widening the geographical coverage of the dictionary. This is in recognition of the fundamental changes that the English-speaking world has undergone since the OED was first conceived: the emerging language communities of 19 th century now speak established varieties of English that are developing their own standards of grammar, pronunciation, and lexis. OED3 recognizes that with the current status of English as a world language, no longer is British English to be regarded as the dominant form of English-it is only one of the many individual varieties of the language that share a common lexical core but develop their own unique vocabularies. Early research to our academic audience has surfaced feedback that OED users would like more coverage of World English, and we would now like to understand more about this need. If your work relates to World English, and you would be interested to offer your opinion, please do take our survey here: https://bit.ly/328obBX

The acoustic properties of narrow focus are language-specific. Post-focus compression of pitch is one of the most prominent factors characterizing focus in English, but it is not present in Cantonese, where duration and intensity are more dominant. Hong Kong English (HKE) is an emerging variety of English in Hong Kong, characterized by speakers who grow up learning English from a young age, but with input highly influenced from the dominant language Cantonese. Experiments were conducted testing production and perception of focus in HKE speakers. An overall tendency was observed for speakers to have accurate perception, but production that was non-characteristic of traditional varieties of English. Analysis of the highest-scoring participants found that their usage of pitch to mark focus was minimal, but usage of duration was significant.

Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred from the UK to China in 1997. There have been many discussions of how this change might affect the future of Hong Kong English (HKE) and whether HKE would become a legitimate variety of English. Bolton (2000) suggested that after 1997 there might be a space for Hong Kong English while Joseph (1996) suggested that HKE may emerge because of the developing Hong Kong identity. Twenty years after these predictions, the status of HKE might have changed. The present study intends to assess the current status of HKE by exploring people’s attitudes towards different English varieties, and to predict potential future change in HKE.

A matched-guise method (Lambert et al, 1960) was used to test participants’ attitudes towards different English varieties. A male and a female bi-dialectal speaker of Southern Standard British English (SSBE) and General American English (GenAmE) produced two recordings each, namely <The North Wind and the Sun> in RP and GenAmE. Two male HKE speakers read the same passage, one with a strong HKE accent (HKE-strong) and another with a subtle HKE accent (HKE-subtle). 126 Hong Kong people completed an online attitude test of English accents. They listened to the eight recordings and gave judgements using a 6 point Likert scale on 21 traits such as friendliness, intelligence and politeness.

SSBE was rated as more prestigious and more attractive than GenAmE and HKE. Both the male and female bi-dialectal speakers were rated more prestigious when they spoke SSBE, but a sex difference was observed on attractiveness. The male bi-dialectal speaker was rated more attractive when he spoke GenAmE, whereas the female speaker was rated higher when she spoke SSBE.

HKE-subtle was rated less prestigious than the RP recordings while HKE-strong was rated as the least prestigious variety. Interestingly, both HKE-subtle and HKE-strong were significantly more attractive than the female GenAmE recording and the male RP recording.

There are a few implications of the present study. The Hong Kong participants tend to accept both HKE-subtle and HKE-strong in terms of attractiveness. This indicates that there is a space for HKE, but the near native English accent used by Hong Kong elites is more prestigious. A strongly localised accent is not yet widely acknowledged in Hong Kong.
The question remains whether English is a linguistic marker to signal Hong Kong identity. If Hong Kongers want to distinguish themselves from the British after decolonization, we might predict they would avoid British English. But this is not supported by the current results. If it is the mainland Chinese that they want to distinguish from, a localised English accent is not a good choice because it shares key non-native features with Mandarin-accented English, such as final stop deletion. Instead, a British-influenced local variety English like HKE-subtle, rated as the relatively prestigious and attractive, is more likely to become the trend of HKE in the future. This is supported by the results that 66% of the participants chose British English as the most favourable accent in teaching English.

What factors prompt the evolution and stabilisation of a new contact variety? It has been argued that, for a new variety of English to genuinely qualify as a variety, it has to be used widely and spontaneously in a society, for internally driven norms to emerge. In a context such as Hong Kong which is essentially Cantonese-dominant, and where, for the majority of Hongkongers, English, in spite of its co-official status, is really only used in education, how is Hong Kong English (HKE) meant to develop? This paper discusses three factors characteristic of the global knowledge economy that act as catalysts which advance the evolution of linguistic practices in Hong Kong and the development of HKE. First, computer-mediated communication favours the use of English, and subsequently prompts its spread to other domains. Second, popular culture and the media assist in the spread of cultural concepts and their associated terms, and the consequent dissemination of innovations. And third, education (and human capital) brings about deep learning and transformation in the users themselves, such that any linguistic insecurity and self-censorship in the use, and thus spread and penetration of the New English, a common hurdle in such communities, are overcome. The paper closes by discussing dominance in an ecology, and speed of change, as well as critically evaluating what Hong Kong English actually encompasses.

The present study investigates how the teachers of English in Hong Kong react to Hong Kong English and how the preferences on accents of the HKTEs have potentially been a part of Washback in English pronunciation teaching in Hong Kong. By analyzing two rounds of data collected in 2016 and 2018 that consist of 180 questionnaires and 800 minutes of interviews from language teachers and students, the Washback of pronunciation teaching was revealed. The result suggested that both teachers and students are under the effect of Washback in pronunciation teaching. While both teachers and students acknowledged the common use of Hong Kong English, they both expressed that there is a standard accent, British English, for the examination, which is not explicitly stated in both the examination syllabus and any related materials. At the end, a Washback model for pronunciation teaching in Hong Kong is shown.

This corpus-based study reports on both a quantitative and a qualitative accounts of the use of collective nouns in Hong Kong English, with particular reference to subject-verb agreement/concord patterns. While the advantages of using corpus data in linguistic research have been widely recognised, researching into world Englishes through the exploitation of corpus-linguistic tools has been a relatively new endeavour. That having been said, the creation of the International Corpus of English (ICE) is undoubtedly the key to the emerging corpus-based approach. Since its inception in the late 1980s, the ICE project has successfully compiled comparable English corpora for quite a number of English-speaking contexts: East Africa, Great Britain, India, New Zealand, Philippines and Singapore. Specifically, the Hong Kong component of ICE (ICE-HK) was completed and available for public use in 2006. This study has benefited significantly from the ICE-HK corpus for a fairly large representative sample of Hong Kong English, examining singular collective nouns as subjects and how the following verb or pronoun agrees with them in number, as well as accessing previous claims that concord variations with collective nouns are semantically or pragmatically motivated by the traditional 'collectivity vs individuality' principle and the semantics of the following verb phrase. It has been found that singular concord is the preferred choice in over eighty percent of instances. It has also been demonstrated that convention rather than semantic/ pragmatic motivation plays a crucial role in concord patterns with collective nouns, with individual collective nouns showing their own preferences for a singular or plural form.

Mak, B. C. N. (2019). Teaching Hong Kong English before teaching academic English: The gateway to effective learning of college writing. Journal of Linguistics and Education Research, 2(1), 8-18. ISSN: 2630-5097. Available: https://doi.org/10.30564/jler.v2i1.331. (Indexed in WorldCat, OCLC)

Owing to the negative view of Hong Kong English (HKE) in popular discourse, few English lecturers in Hong Kong universities directly acknowledge or discuss the variety in a non-linguistic course. This paper illustrates an action research study of how HKE may play a role in an academic writing course of a sub-degree program in Hong Kong. Focusing on 8 representatives from an academic writing course with 100 students, it employed the qualitative experiment method to examine whether students who had possessed basic linguistic knowledge of HKE from an additional tutorial would perceive HKE and academic writing differently from those who had not. Student representatives from each group were invited to a focus group to explore ideas about the two subjects discussed in class. Their conversations suggested that prior knowledge of the syntactic features of HKE might raise students' awareness of the grammatical differences between the variety and the standard. The analysis also suggested that introducing the linguistic view of HKE to students might render them optimistic about their variety, helping them identify the situations where the variety would be tolerant of and settings where Standard English would be expected. The study suggested that such an intervention might facilitate students’ learning of Standard English for academic purposes and practices of English in actual professional communication. Upon the improvement or advancement, they will position themselves more powerfully in the dichotomy between the standard and non-standard. More formal research on a similar or relevant topic is required to validate the impact of understanding HKE on learning academic writing.

The current study examines patterns of TH variation in Hong Kong English (HKE). In particular, it examines patterns in the realization of the voiceless interdental fricative /θ/ as the voiceless labiodental fricative [f], 2 a process known as TH-fronting, as well as realization of the voiceless of TH as [s]. Previous research on HKE (Bolton & Kwok 1990; Hung 2000; Deterding et al. 2008; Setter et al. 2010) has established that TH-fronting is a variable phenomenon in HKE, with both intra-and inter-speaker variation, though no research to date has examined the social and linguistic constraints that govern this phenomenon in HKE. The current study also examines the realization of TH as [s], which has not been documented in previous research on HKE, but was found to be a variant of TH in the current study. This article thus examines the social (defined here as non-linguistic constraints such as gender, medium of instruction and proficiency) and linguistic (syllable position, linguistic environment, stress) factors which impact the realization of TH in HKE and whether these factors differ for the realization of TH as [f] or [s].

Hong Kong English (HKE) has been widely researched recently in the linguistics fields like phonology (e,g, Hansen Edwards, 2015a; Hung, 2000, 2012; Setter et al., 2010); however, there is a lack of research on teachers' perception to this new variety of English. In the present study, data is collected through 92 questionnaires and 23 semi-structured interviews with current teachers of English (both natives and non-natives) in Hong Kong who teach in primary, secondary and terriary institutes. The aims of this study are to investigate the teachers' attitudes towards HKE and their perceptions in particular to the segmental features of HKE in order to answer the research question of whether the attitudes of English teachers towards HKE may alter their teaching practices. The findings suggest that the attitudes (especially behavioral attitudes) of the English teachers may affect their teaching practices in real life classrooms, for instance, the preferences of choosing a particular English accent as the norm or model for their students to follow. Further research has to be done on the feasibility of the implimentation of HKE into the Hong Kong Education curriculum.

Attributed to disparate goals as well as tenets of prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar, disagreement exists between the two in that prescriptive grammar rules may be violated in descriptive grammar; one concrete instance is subject-operator disagreement in English existential constructions. The present study aims at following up antecedent studies on subject-operator disagreement in English existential constructions produced by native English speakers, identifying any changes in patterns of subject-operator disagreement in recent years, and looking specifically into subject-operator disagreement in English existential constructions in Hong Kong English. A quantitative research design was exploited, and data of American English and Hong Kong English were collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the PolyU Learner English Corpus respectively. It was discovered that subject-operator disagreement in English existential constructions was rare amongst American English speakers yet more frequent amongst speakers of Hong Kong English. Rarity of subject-operator disagreement in English existential constructions produced by American English speakers possesses a disposition to suggest that language use of those speakers is still influenced by the prescriptive rule of subject-operator agreement in English existential constructions while pervasiveness of subject-operator disagreement in English existential constructions produced by speakers in Hong Kong English indicates disparities between those speakers’ language use and prescriptive rules.

Topicalization refers to the sentence-initial placement of constituents other than the subject and is often listed as a non-canonical construction [cf. Ward, Gregory, Betty J. Birner and Rodney Huddleston (2002). “Information Packaging.” Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, eds. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1363–1447.]. In this paper, tokens of topicalization in the direct conversations in the International Corpus of English for Hong Kong and India and, for comparison, Great Britain are analysed. In order to find out if topicalization is a contact-induced feature, typological profiles with regard to topic-prominence [Li, Charles N. and Sandra A. Thompson (1976). “Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language.” Charles N. Li, ed. Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press, 457–489.] are created for three Indo-Aryan, three Dravidian and two Sinitic languages. I suggest that the low frequencies of topicalization in Hong Kong English and the high frequencies of topicalization in Indian English are primarily due to differences in intensity of contact [Thomason, Sarah G. (2001). Language Contact. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.] and variety development [Schneider, Edgar W. (2007). Postcolonial English. Varieties Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]. Typological interference at the level of information structure is assumed to only come to the fore in further developed varieties and after prolonged contact.

This paper examines the newly developed tones in Cantonese English, with a particular interest in the tones spanning across syllables. It attempts to provide phonetic evidence for the tone spans and demonstrate the association of tones to syllables.

Audio-recording data elicited from six speakers of Cantonese English was processed with Praat, and then fitted to a smoothing spline analysis of variance with R to generate smoothing splines at 95% confidence intervals for determining if the the tones in different positions of a word are significantly different from each other. Pitch tracks of tones in individual words were also generated for a detailed examination of the tone contours of the tone spans.

Results showed that the realization of different tones was restricted by the position of the syllables in a word. Those tones are significantly different from each other. H spans, Ø spans and M spans were discussed and illustrated with tonal associations.

As is common in work on prosodic typology, the notions 'tone' and 'stress' play a key role in Wee's 2016 study of the tone system of Hong Kong English (HKE). Based on the absence of pho-netic correlates of stress and the distribution of tone in polysyllabic words, Wee claims that HKE must have lexical (high) tone. In this reply, we argue that, even in the absence of phonetic correlates of stress, foot structure provides a more parsimonious account of the distribution of surface tones. Multiple high tones within words follow from predictable morphological structure and/or tonal spreading, rather than from lexical tone.*

This paper contributes data towards a phonological description of intonation in Hong Kong English (HKE), an emergent, 'nativising' but under-described variety of English spoken primarily as the second language of L1 Cantonese speakers. We demonstrate choice and realisation of nuclear tones for ten HKE-speaking and ten British English (BrE)-speaking university students. All speakers were recorded undertaking a storytelling task in which different nuclear tones are canonically associated with different types of utterance, e.g., yes/no question and sarcastic statement. New BrE data not only provide a point of comparison, but also demonstrate ways in which form and function of contemporary BrE prosody have changed since the textbook descriptions of the last century. Greatest disparity between the groups is found for 'tag' phrases such as in checking, and in the paralinguistic use of rise-fall. Production of target contours ranged from 64 to 86% for the BrE cohort, 43-71% for HKE. 1. MOTIVATION The intonation of English (and of many languages) is notoriously difficult for the L2 speaker to acquire, and is typically neglected in the teaching of English as a foreign language. At the same time, emergent varieties of post-colonial World Englishes such as Hong Kong English (HKE) develop their own prosodic grammars, predominantly influenced, it is assumed, by features of an L1. In the case of HKE we expect to find the influence of Cantonese, along with British and North American varieties of English, in the prosody as in other areas of the grammar. Here we document aspects of HKE nucleus placement and toneme choice based on a recent set of recordings. Such a description calls for a reference grammar of British English (BrE) intonation. While such descriptions abound ([7], [2]) they are notoriously complex: for example, a nuclear fall-rise ('the switchback') is listed in [7: 170] with a variety of paralinguistic meanings, contingent on linguistic context, such as 'grudgingly admitting' in statements, but 'greatly astonished' in echo questions. Not only does such complexity bolster sentiment that the teaching and learning of English intonation is difficult [10: 2], it would also seem likely that there would be a good deal of variation in usage in Britain. With the passing of nearly half a century since [7], we seek to describe the patterns in modern British English, which even in the South are likely to have departed somewhat from textbook 'Received Pronunciation' (RP). We outline our methodology for obtaining production data for both accents in a highly controlled storytelling routine, and present our findings. We predict significant differences in the choice and realisation of intonational contours between HKE and BrE, and likely also between BrE and textbook RP.