Multilingual Hong Kong: A Sociolinguistic Research
多語香港: 社會語言學研究
“Chinglish” Art Exhibition Poster. source: Hong Kong Government website
"From the beginning, Hong Kong has been bewildered in two totally distinct languages... Hong Kong people have always been searching for themselves between the Chinese and English languages”
Tam, director of the Hong Kong Art Museum, introducing the "Chinglish" Art Exhibition 2007.
I have been conducting ethnographic and linguistic research on multilingualism in Hong Kong for years, focusing on the major languages, Cantonese and English, as well as their constant repositioning with each other and Putonghua in the multilingual context of Hong Kong. It started with my fascination of Cantonese prescriptivism in the media and school contexts. Between 1994-1997 I conducted a research to take a snapshot of Hong Kong’s public debates about Cantonese right before the hand-over to China. I followed media campaigns, educational policies, and scholarly debates about “correct Cantonese pronunciation” to trace the language ideologies of the community. Specifically, I research prescriptive ideologies about Cantonese "lazy" pronunciation. “Lazy” pronunciation refers to phonological variation occurring in eight pairs of syllable-initial and final consonants. For example, the first person pronoun “I” has two variants: a colloquial/”lazy” form [o] with an initial glottal stop, and a dictionary form [ngo] with an initial velar nasal. The colloquial forms are commonly considered as ‘lazy’, ‘ugly’, and ‘destroying Chinese culture’. These aesthetic, cultural, and perceptual qualities are part of a naturalization and differentiation process that is closely associated with the renegotiation of Cantonese identity at the edge of a change in political economy—when Hong Kong was returning to the sovereignty of China (which is under a Putonghua “common language” policy). My research questions include: What sort of community-wide identity(ies) is to be constructed to differentiate Hong Kong from other big cities in China? How does research on language ideologies help explain the link between microlinguistic phenomenon (in this case ‘lazy pronunciation’) with macro societal trajectory (the renegotiation of Cantonese identity)? More specifically, what do folk beliefs about language mean to Hong Kong people (i.e. what attributes are iconized, erased, repeated (Irvine and Gal 1995); and from which/whose perspectives)? This ethnographic research continues as I expand my focus from Cantonese to multilingualism in Hong Kong.
A scene from a television program promoting correct Cantonese pronunciation in the 1990’s.
In the late 1980’s and 1990’s, Hong Kong experienced a “brain drain” out-migration anticipating the political handover. At this time, public debates about Hong Kong’s possible marginalization being “just another big city in China” brought up much sentiment about Hong Kong people’s love-hate complex with the English and Chinese languages. A sizeable number of these emigrants, as well as second and third generation emigrants, returned to Hong Kong after the mid-1990’s, having obtained foreign citizenship. Under this backdrop, between 2002-2007 (my dissertation research), and again in 2012-2017 (GRF-supported research), I examine the practices and identity positioning of these repatriated migrants and compare them with the locals. Using ethnography, matched-guise tests, focus-group discussion, social media research, and conversation analysis of daily-life spontaneous speech, I observe the style-shifting language practices and identity negotiation of the returnees as well as the locals. I argue that the self-proclaimed Hong Kong persons/locals are de-authenticating the returnees as over-westernized “others” by calling them socially loaded labels such as “bananas” and “ghosts”. These individual acts of differentiation illuminate the opposing language and cultural ideologies of Chinese vs. Western which repeats themselves recursively in multiple scales across socio-historical periods. This research explains the social meanings of code-switching with language ideologies. It bridges the micro-macro connections, as these seemingly “micro” interactions are traced to review larger elements at work, from the distribution of language as (symbolic) resources in society, to issues of class, mobility, and cultural/ethnic/national identities.
Funding
Completed 2016 - Hong Kong Government Research Grants Council General Research Fund (GRF) “Coming home as strangers: A sociolinguistic ethnography of transnational bilinguals in Hong Kong.” Principal and sole Investigator. HKD 572,643.
Completed 2012 - HKU Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research, “Overseas returnees’ linguistic strategies in multilingual Hong Kong: a corpus and sociolinguistic analysis.” Principal and sole Investigator. HKD 110,000.
Publications
Chen, K. (2018) "Ideologies of Language Standardization: The case of Cantonese in Hong Kong" In James Tollefson and Miguel Pérez-Milans (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning. UK: Oxford University Press.
Chen, K. (2015) “Styling bilinguals: Analyzing structurally distinctive code-switching styles in Hong Kong” In Gerald Stell and Kofi Yakpo (eds.) Code-switching between structural and socio-linguistic perspectives. pp.163-183. Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
Chen, K. (2009) “The Academic Debate on the Standardisation of Cantonese” In Kingsley Bolton and Han Yang (eds.). Language in Society in Hong Kong. pp. 137-154. The Open University of Hong Kong Press.
Chen, K. (2008) “Positioning and Repositioning: Identity Negotiation of Overseas Returning Bilinguals in Hong Kong” Special issue "Accomplishing Identity in Bilingual Interaction" Multilingua. Volume 27, Issue 1-2, pp. 57-75. Walter de Gruyter and Co. SSCI.
Films
Chen, K and Carper, G. (2017, 2005) Multilingual Hong Kong: A Sociolinguistic Case Study of Code-Switching. Documentary film, 30 minutes. English and Cantonese, with English subtitles. It was shown in a number of conferences (NWAV33, ISB5, LSHK2005, SS16), used in many universities internationally for teaching. The film is acquired by Films for the Humanities and Sciences for distribution in North America. Scholars who have limited access to library subscription are welcome to contact me for free documentary film preview.
Chen, K. (2017) Multilingual Hong Kong: Coming home as a stranger. Documentary film, 8 minutes. English and Cantonese, with English subtitles.
Linguistic Corpus
Chen, K. (2018). Multilingual Hong Kong Corpus. Hong Kong Cantonese-English-Putonghua multilingual adult spontaneous speech corpus. 100,000 words, 15-hour audio recording synced with three-tier transcription and translation in ELAN format. GRF-funded.
Presentations
Chen, K. 2021 “Transnational Hong Kong: the stories of places, times, and people”. Sociolinguistics Symposium 23. June, 2021, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Chen, K. 2021 “Chronotope and the idea of home among transnational returnees in Hong Kong”. Special Session, the language effects of im/mobility, New Waves of Analyzing Variation-Asia Pacific 6, February. National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Chen, K. 2019 "Transnational identities and ideologies in Hong Kong". In Ancestry and Language Symposium, University of Sydney, Australia. (Invited talk)
Chen, K. 2018 “Bewildered Hong Kong: multilingual practices, language ideologies, and identities”. Sociolinguistic Symposium 22, Auckland, New Zealand.
Chen, K. 2017 "Language ideologies and identities in Hong Kong". In Center for Language Education, South University of Science & Technology of China, China. (Invited talk)
Chen, K. 2016 "Return migration, multilingual practices, and new flexible identities in Hong Kong". In a panel "Polycentric approaches to language and transnational migration". Sociolinguistic Symposium 21, June 2016, Universidad De Murcia, Spain.
Chen, K. 2015 "Language and identity in two mobile communities in Hong Kong". (Connected to Project 2). In Worldwide Universities Network "Understanding Globalisation - Margins and Peripheries" Research Group Workshop on "Contemporary Chinese mobilities". The University of Cape Town, South Africa. (Invited talk)
Chen, K. 2015 “English in multilingual Hong Kong” in an invited roundtable “English in multilingual Asia”, the Sociolinguistics of Globalization Conference. The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.