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Hong Kong English is to a certain extent a standardized English variety spoken in a bilingual (English-Cantonese) context. In this article we compare this (native) variety with English as a foreign language spoken by other Cantonese speakers, viz. learners of English in Guangzhou (mainland China). We examine whether the notion of standardization is relevant for intonation in this case and thus whether Hong Kong English is different from Cantonese English in a wider perspective, or whether it is justified to treat Hong Kong English and Cantonese English as the same variety (as far as intonation is concerned). We present a comparison between intonational contours of different sentence types in the two varieties, and show that they are very similar. This shows that, in this respect, a learned foreign-language variety can resemble a native variety to a great extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of attitudes towards the Hong Kong English accent have concluded that Hong Kong has a strongly exonormative orientation, with no sign of endonormative stabilisation (see, for example, Luk, 2010). This paper contends that these findings are partly a result of a varieties-based approach to Hong Kong English, which tends to neglect the considerable variation in feature use that exists between speakers. As a complementary perspective, this paper outlines a features-based approach which acknowledges this variation. The results of an accent survey involving 12 local accents and 52 local listeners are presented, and the findings are discussed with reference to variational patterns in the use of features. The results indicate that the phonological features of accents are important determinants of listener responses, and suggest that Hong Kong English accents may be acceptable for pedagogical purposes if they do not contain certain salient features. An apparent correspondence between the acceptability and intelligibility characteristics of features is noted and tentatively explained using the concept of salience. The implications of the study's findings for issues such as variety status, the distinction between ?variants? and ?errors,? and pedagogy, are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Expressions of gratitude often occur as functional lexical chunks such as thanks and thank you (). 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines inter-speaker phonological variation within a mini-corpus of spoken Hong Kong English. The study focuses on consonantal features, and indicates that variation in the use of these features follows patterns that are implicational or hierarchical in nature. The findings are presented in the form of an implicational scale, in which the use of a particular feature by a speaker implies the use of other features by that speaker. The implicational patterns are discussed with reference to the intelligibility characteristics of the features and possible developmental pathways among L2 users. The possible relevance of the findings for areas of study such as the description of new varieties of English is also considered, with particular regard to pedagogical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This monograph provides an overview of the language situation in Hong Kong from a historical perspective. Hong Kong has evolved in the past 167 years from a small fishing port to an international financial centre which forms part of a financial network hailed by Time Magazine as Ny.Lon.Kong (i.e. New York-London-Hong Kong). Hong Kong has gone through changes of sovereignty twice, once in 1842 as a Chinese territory ceded to Britain after the first Opium War, and a second time in 1997 as a British colony returned to China. It is a micro polity with no natural resources except its deep harbour. Economically, Hong Kong has gradually developed from a fishing port when British settlement began in 1841, to an entrepot during 1945-1950s, to a manufacturing hub during 1960-1970s, to an international financial centre since the 1980s. The historical, political and economic development has had a great impact on the language situation in Hong Kong. Its language community started with two separate monolingual groups: one consisting of local Chinese speaking Cantonese and other Chinese dialects, and the other composed of British colonists speaking English. Because of language spread and language shift as a result of political, economic and social changes, the monolingual group of Chinese speakers has become trilingual, speaking Cantonese, English and Putonghua, whereas the monolingual group of English speakers has expanded to include native speakers of such other English varieties as American English, Australian English, Canadian English, Indian English and Singaporean English. In addition, there is a large group of minorities composed of bilingual speakers of English and a south Asian language. Although the development of language use is a natural process, it can be influenced by the government's language policy and planning. In 1997 there was a major political change, and Hong Kong, a capitalist city that practised a free economy for 155 years, was handed back to a socialist regime in China and now functions as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC) under the 'One Country Two Systems' policy. Hong Kong's prospects for a changing language situation depend on its political and economic development as well as PRC's policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English and Cantonese are the main two languages in contact in Hong Kong, together with some other minority Sinitic languages and a variety of Austronesian languages spoken by domestic helpers. Cantonese and English are typologically dissimilar in terms of word order, tense, mood and aspect marking, noun phrase structure, relative clause formation, the formation of interrogatives, and argument structure. Yet there is no work which systematically explores how these morphosyntactic typological differences are revealed in Hong Kong English (HKE). This paper explores how a typological perspective facilitates an analysis of the expression of finiteness in HKE, a significant feature because it subsumes a number of other typological facts. The analysis claims that HKE is a new English variety where the typology of the substrate is more directly responsible for the morphosyntactic features under analysis than the typology of the lexifier [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a detailed description of the pronunciation of English by fifteen fourth-year undergraduates at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. First, the occurrence of American features of pronunciation is considered. Then there is an analysis of the pronunciation of initial TH, initial and final consonant clusters, L-vocalisation, conflation between initial [n] and [l], monophthong vowels, the vowels in FACE and GOAT, vowel reduction, rhythm and sentence stress. Finally, the status of Hong Kong English is considered, particularly the extent of its continuing alignment with an exonormative standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]