Succeeding the previous literature review regarding Kongish and the construction of an in-group Hong Kong identity, this section will draw upon pre-existing studies related to Kongish and youth culture, in explanation of Kongish as a new mode of communication for the youth, as well as a marker of age-based in-group membership which favours adolescents, and excludes those who does not belong to this age group.
Youth culture and language
Rice (1996, p. 405) defined youth culture as "the sum of the ways of living of adolescents; it refers to the body of norms, values, and practices recognised and shared by members of the adolescent society as appropriate guides to actions", hence highlighted youth culture as a symbolic system that is exclusively constructed and maintained by teenagers or young adults, in establishing and displaying their identities which are distinct from other age groups. Making correlations between language and youth culture, Bucholtz (2005) asserts the significance of language in mediating the expression of this cultural style, and subsequently the performance of youth identity, as she acknowledges language as a highly flexible and omnipresent set of resources.
Youth culture and digitality
Furthermore, Bucholtz (2005, p. 281) recognises the digital media as an inseparable part of the youth culture. She described adolescents as "the most enthusiastic, expert, and creative users of new media", underscoring their superior digital literacy among all age groups, which marked the digital world as a youths' space where they expresses their cultural identities. Contextualising this situation in Hong Kong, although 9-year free compulsory education has been provided by the Hong Kong Government since the academic year of 1978/79, and later extended to 12 years in 2008/09, it was not until 1998 when the schools begin to concentrate significant effort on Information Technology Education as the Government announced the "Information Technology for Learning in a New Era: Five-Year Strategy– 1998/99 to 2002/03". Thereupon, students are trained to nimbly use the digital technology in their learning (Education Bureau, 1998), while media literacy became an important objective in "Personal, Social and Humanities Education ("PSHE")", one of the eight Key Learning Areas ("KLAs") (LegCo, 2012). Thus, with the earliest and greatest exposure to digital and media technology that have largely excluded older generations (A survey conducted discovered that approximately 40% of the respondents aged 55 or over from Hong Kong had very little or no knowledge of computer skills (Chan, Philips & Fong, 2003, p.10) ), the post-1990s generation has the attained the highest online digital literacy.
Kongish as a digital language
Interestingly, scholars have observed that Kongish can be characterised as digital on an unprecedented degree. As noted by Sewell and Chan (2016, p. 597, 601), Kongish first appeared on an online commentary can be traced back to August 2015, and it occurs in online written forms of communication on social media platforms (e.g. Whatsapp, facebook), due to its ability to facilitate written interaction through its affordances by few keyboard characters (i.e. the English alphabet and numbers), in contrast to the extensive keyboard input needed for typing Traditional Chinese. As Kongish substantially adopts conversational, oral characteristics of Cantonese in a written form, they drew upon Logan's (2010, p.103) concept of "digital orality" in defining Kongish, which encapsulates the idea of transforming speech into written texts through the Internet (Sewell & Chan, 2016, 601). Therefore, accessing Kongish as a digital language, the usage Kongish becomes in-group marker for adolescents (especially the 90s), who privileged access to digital and media expertise required in the usage of Kongish, and therefore has become the most avid users and influencer of Kongish of all age groups. In this process, people who belonged to other generations, who have less resources in acquiring digital literacy are excluded from the usage of Kongish.
Youth culture and anti-language
Halliday (1976, p. 570) introduced the concept of anti-language, which is defined as the linguistic phenomena that is anti-society, or in other words, a mode of resistance against the authority and the established norms that are accepted by the mainstream society, possibly taking on the forms of "passive symbiosis" or "active hostility". Adopting this notion for the study of youth's language, Luk (2005, p. 33) claimed that teenagers participates in the usage of anti-language with teenage slangs, which functions to seek psychological independence as well as self-identity distinct from adults. Hence, anti-language that counters the society serves as a resource for adolescents to perform their rebellious and creative youth identity.
Slang in Kongish
Although the usage of slangs by other age groups is an undeniable fact, it is agreed upon researchers that teenagers are the most active and frequent users of slangs, thus should have to right to claim slang as a youth's language (Luk, 2005, p.2). Sewell and Chan (2016, p. 598) have acknowledged Cantonese slang as one of the important features drawn upon in the use of Kongish under its strong influences from spoken Cantonese. One of the creative examples of Kongish slang brought upon was words with numeral infixes that implied vulgarity, such as "exac7ly", "sor9y" and "on9", which not only playfully exploit the similarity between the Cantonese pronunciation of the numbers ("七"－cat1, "九"－gau2) and the swear words ("柒"－cat1, "鳩"－gau1), but also creatively exploits the availability of keyboard characters (Sewell & Chan, 2016, p. 599). Hence, through the incorporation of slangs in Kongish, adolescents displays their identities as rebels by resisting to conform the societal standards of proper languages propagated by the authoritative institutions, and further demonstrates the creative intelligence and humour of young minds.