HAAL 2016

Special Session (Venue: Y304, Core Y)

 

Positioning Kongish in Hong Kong English: A case study of Kongish Daily

 

Speakers: Nick Wong, Alfred Tsang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology); Pedro Lok (Tung Wah College)

Discussant: Dr. Katherine Chen (The University of Hong Kong)

 

The debate of whether a distinctive variety of English exists in Hong Kong began in the early 1980s. The lack of societal basis for indigenization or nativization was one of the main arguments denying the existence of Hong Kong English (HKE) (Luke & Richard, 1982). As time went by, scholars brought in different views and considered HKE as a distinctive variety (Bolton, 2002; Schneider, 2003; Joseph, 2004). However, the debate seems to have neglected the fact that more than one types of HKE coexist in the local speech community. With the popularity of social media in recent years, HKE speakers enjoy unprecedented opportunities to encounter different types of HKE in their communication, through which the linguistic notion ‘Kongish’ has been generated in a very recent time among its speakers. This paper explores how ‘Kongish’ has emerged as a type of HKE within the HKE continuum, and how people perceive ‘Kongish’.

 

Of the present study, Kongish Daily, a Facebook page created in August 2015 which features satirical news posts and provides netizens with a platform to discuss matters entirely in HKE, is under investigation. Over 50 posts, including readers’ comments, were collected to compile a specialised corpus consisting of 38000 tokens with 4722 types of words. The examples were carefully examined, where three types of loanword practice were identified, namely (1) semantic translation; (2) phonetic transliteration; and (3) translanguaging. The notion of HKE was reviewed by investigating the readers’ comments, triangulating the findings of the focus group discussions with subscribers of Kongish Daily.

 

Recent research predicts that electronic communication facilitates the development of HKE in its indigenization or nativisation (Ho, 2006; Lee, 2007). As Kongish Daily succeeds in being the major platform of interaction and exchange in HKE, it is anticipated that the page will continue to serve as an important database for the study of non-acrolectal HKE.

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About the Speakers and Discussant

 

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