2. Demonstration of Social Categorisation through Kongish

This section comprises of literature reviews which focused on social categorisation. Three research papers will be reviewed, namely “Stereotypes and prejudice: essential readings” by Charles Stangor, “Speaking of global virtual teams: language differences, social categorization and media choice” by Anders Klitmøller, Susan Carol Schneider and Karsten Jonsen, and "Discourse analysis : a resource book for students" by Rodney Jones.

By reviewing these two articles, we are able to get a better interpretation of the social categorisation, which lays a clearer and stronger theoretical framework for our study. Along with the theory of social categorisation, we will also come across with the theory of in-group favouritism and some other concepts, which are also a crucial term that facilitates us to make sense of the phenomenon of the stereotype of or discrimination against Kongish.

Understandably, many people misinterpret the term stereotype, prejudice and discrimination as three interchangeable terms. Hence, before we begin to delve into the case of Kongish, it is crucial to understand the difference between the definition of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination in order to understand the current case more thoroughly.

Based on Stangor's (2000) definitions:

• Stereotype: refers to "beliefs about the characteristics of groups of individuals" (p.1)
• Prejudice: refers to "a negative feeling or negative attitude toward the members of a group" (p.1)
• Discrimination: refers to the negative behaviours produced by stereotypes and prejudice towards others (p.11)

Please keep in mind of the differences between the three terms while you're reading the following section, but if you find yourself confused at any point, you can definitely scroll back to reading these definitions.

Social Categorisation

According to Stangor (2000), social categorisation happens when people regard a person as a member of a group of people, for example, based on their physical characteristics or other types of categories, rather than considering him or her as a unique individual (p.2). As a result, stereotypes and prejudice occur, along with ingroup and outgroup identities. As much as we would want to treat everyone equally as a unique individual with their own characteristics, “social categorisation is a natural phenomenon” (Stangor, 2000, p.2), which cannot be erased even if we want to. Nevertheless, it is possible for individuals to go beyond social categorisation to understand another person more thoroughly, which depends on the time and interest we have in that person. This consequently leads to a re-categorisation of the individual into a subtype. (Stangor, 2000, p.3).

How can language be regarded as a social category?

Nevertheless, some might question how can language, and in our case, Kongish, be regarded as a social category. According to Jones (2012), similar to gender and race, language is inseparable from who we are and the different social groups to which we belong. In addition, in Klitmøller, Schneider, and Jonsen's (2015) research, they have proved how language is a “strong determinant” for social identity (p. 272), which demonstrates that Kongish can be interpreted as a marker of identity. More importantly, since language is acknowledged to be a social category, it reveals that we as humans will inevitably use it to display our social identities and to show that we belong to different groups (i.e. Kongish user group and non-Kongish user group) (Jones, 2000).

In-group favouritism

After we have established that Kongish is a social category, it comes to an essential question of how stereotype, prejudice, or the worst case, discrimination, stem from social categorisation.

As heretofore mentioned, social categorisation results from human's natural tendency to differentiate people into ingroups (i.e. groups that the individual belongs) and outgroups (i.e. groups that the individual does not belong), and this distinction very often results in a phenomenon called "in-group favouritism" (Stangor, 2000, p.13).

To put it simply, in-group favouritism refers to how people will perceive and evaluate members of in-group more favourably than the members of the out-group. Unfortunately, this tendency may cause an individual to feel that his or her group is superior to other groups, which causes prejudice to occur. In the worst-case scenario, that person to produce negative treatment or behaviours toward other individuals, and consequently creates the problem of discrimination (Stangor, 2000, p.11; Klitmøller, Schneider, & Jonsen, 272).

Through analysing some examples from the Internet, we can see how the case of Kongish can demonstrate the concepts of stereotype, prejudice or even discrimination. The example we found on the Facebook page of a Hong Kong tutorial centre, Beacon College, serves as a great example to illustrate the case of discrimination.

For the first and second comment shown in the above, the negative attitude of people who either (1) do not know how to use Kongish, or (2) do not prefer to use Kongish, was displayed in their comments. For example, the person who typed the first comment, he or she expressed that he or she is really irritated by how people type Kongish. As for the person who wrote the second comment, he or she sarcastically question if the people who use Kongish do not know how to type Chinese characters, subtly implying that if he or she knows how to type Chinese characters (which he or she does), he or she will not use Kongish.

These suggest that people will use the type or mode of the language they use (Kongish vs Chinese) to distinguish between in-group members and out-group members. Once individuals established different social categories (e.g. Kongish users and non-Kongish users), the concept of in-group and out-group will start to emerge. In such case, people will begin to show negative attitudes towards the out-group members (i.e. Kongish users). As a result, just like the two comments in the above, people started to show negative behaviours (e.g. expressing their dislikes for Kongish users) towards out-group members, which is Kongish users, in this case, thereby illustrating our point that Kongish can be a case of discrimination.

Nevertheless, we would like to clarify that we do not disregard the possibility that Kongish users can also discriminate against non-Kongish users. It is only because of how we observed that generally, the case is that Kongish users are the ones being discriminated against in the online discourse. More examples on Kongish and cases of discrimination of Kongish will be given in the next "Examples" section.