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Wong offers a fascinating linguistic analysis of blogs in Hong Kong English (HKE), drawing on insights taken from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Using an online corpus analysis interface, Wmatrix, Wong provides a reliable account of parts-of-speech categories and semantic domains that are statistically significant in the online blog postings retrieved from the Hong Kong segment of GloWbE, highlighting the linguistic variation of the HKE blog variety of digital discourse that has not been explored before.

Looking at data taken from the ICE-HK corpus, Wong focusses on the use of expressions of gratitude such as thanks a lot and thank you very much in Hong Kong English. She suggests that Hong Kong speakers of English do not employ a wide variety of thanking strategies and their expressions of gratitude are usually brief, with thanks and thank you being the most commonly used forms. More often than not, these expressions are used as a closing signal and as a complete turn. Repetitive gratitude formulae and appreciation of the interlocutors in conversations are exceedingly rare, hinting at the possibility of substrate influence that Chinese people in general are being too reserved to express their gratitude openly and explicitly.

Focussing on the code-mixing phenomenon in Hong Kong English, Wong offers a detailed literature review on the ways in which English elements are being mixed into Cantonese and thus she argues that there is far less scholarship on code-mixing of indigenous Cantonese words into English. She also draws attention to the crucial argument that this kind of unexplored code-mixing pattern could be related to ethnic solidarity and identity. Having examined the ICE-HK corpus, she finds out that Cantonese colloquial formulaic sequences and cultural expressions occur prominently in both spoken and written texts, suggesting that code-mixing could be a solidarity marker. The chapter also explores other motivations for code-mixing such as the absence of a semantic match between Cantonese proper nouns and their English translations.

This chapter summarises and assesses the diachronic and synchronic evidence presented in this study of the English language in Hong Kong. The chapter commences by restating the objectives of the study and then proceeds to highlight the main findings of the chapters on government, education, business, the English-using community, and Hong Kong English. It then moves on to discuss the contribution of the study to the literature on English in Hong Kong and in the Outer Circle as well as its principal limitations. The chapter concludes by discussing the future of English in the city.