‘Till Death Do Us Wed’—About Ghost Brides and Ghost Weddings in Hong Kong English

Although a large number of varieties of English in Asia have gained recognition as independent varieties, this has not been the case for Hong Kong English (HKE) (Jenkins, 2015: 162). The city has a low level of affiliation towards HKE (Jenkins, 2015: 167) and often laments its ever-falling standard of English (Leung, 2015). There exists a phenomenon of ‘linguistic schizophrenia’ – the community may recognise that a local variety of English exists and conform to its features in practice, but it still looks to native varieties as the norm and views local features as evidence of deteriorating language standards (Kachru, 1983: 118).

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Relative Clauses in Hong Kong English: A Corpus-based Perspective

Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics ◽

10.1515/cjal.2011.031 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 34 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Wang Yan

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Hong Kong English

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Intonation in Hong Kong English and Guangzhou Cantonese-accented English: A Phonetic Comparison

Journal of Language Teaching and Research ◽

10.17507/jltr.1105.07 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (5) ◽

pp. 724

Author(s):

Yunyun Ran ◽

Jeroen Van De Weijer ◽

Marjoleine Sloos

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Foreign Language ◽

Mainland China ◽

Language Variety ◽

Accented English ◽

Hong Kong English

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.

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