A New System of Cantonese one? Tone Perception and Production in Hong Kong South Asian Cantonese

2021 ◽  
pp. 002383092110460
Author(s):  
Alan C. L. Yu ◽  
Crystal W. T. Lee ◽  
Chen Lan ◽  
Peggy P. K. Mok
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
The South ◽  
Discrimination Accuracy ◽  
Ethnic Chinese ◽  
Hong Kong Cantonese ◽  
New System

Studies in language contact have identified many instances of linguistic variation and grammatical innovations introduced by speakers from multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods. This study focuses on the variety of Cantonese spoken by South Asian youths in Hong Kong, specifically their production and perception of Hong Kong Cantonese tones. Our findings show that the South Asian Cantonese speakers have a smaller tonal inventory than the canonical six-tone system of standard Hong Kong Cantonese and their tonal discrimination abilities are also more impoverished relative to their ethnic Chinese peers. Further analysis shows a positive correlation between tonal discrimination accuracy and tonal realization distinctness among the South Asian speakers, but not among the ethnic Chinese. These findings suggest that South Asian Cantonese speakers might have developed a distinct tone system from their ethnic Chinese peers.

The Hong Kong Cantonese language: Current features and future prospects

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
National Language ◽  
Ethnic Chinese ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Hong Kong Cantonese ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Phonetic Features ◽  
To Come ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

AbstractAs the contemporary Chinese language has evolved into various distinguishable varieties across East and Southeast Asian speech communities, the term pluricentric (i. e. having multiple centers or standards) has appropriately been applied to it. Because the development of the Chinese variety as spoken and written in Hong Kong has been profoundly influenced by a unique congeries of social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, historical, and linguistic factors intrinsically linked to Hong Kong, it systematically differs from those varieties used in mainland China and on Taiwan. Hong Kong’s predominant, most widely-used speech variety is Cantonese: this is to say that 90 % of the ethnic Chinese population of about 6.5 million speak it as their usual, daily language. The Hong Kong Cantonese language has acquired an extraordinary status due to its distinctive vocabulary and indigenous Chinese characters, identifiably colloquial phonetic features, highly conventionalized written form, large inventory of English loanwords borrowed through phonetic transliteration, and tradition of lexicography combined with romanization. Although Cantonese predominates in Hong Kong, however, at the same time, a worrying trend is the increasing number of schools switching their medium of instruction from Cantonese to Putonghua, just one noticeable difference between now and 1997 when Hong Kong, a British Crown Colony since 1841, was returned to China’s sovereignty as a Special Administrative Region. The Hong Kong speech community’s attitudes toward Cantonese are contradictory: some people denigrate it as “a coarse, vulgar relic of China’s feudal past” that should be replaced by Putonghua, the national language, while others praise it for preserving ancient rimes and extol it for expressing social, political, and cultural differences that set Hong Kong apart from mainland China. That Cantonese continues to decline in Guangzhou may be a harbinger of things to come in Hong Kong. Ironically, the Hong Kong government’s recognition of the Cantonese language as intangible cultural heritage which would seem to be a good status for it to have, on the contrary, has made some people fear it could become extinct in the future.

scholarly journals The Mistranslation of James Legge in A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms from Eco-Environment Translation Theory

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingxin Li
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
South Asian ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
The South ◽  
Asian Culture ◽  
Jin Dynasty ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Eastern Jin

<em>Fo Guo Ji, known as A Record of Buddhistic Kingdom, was written by Chinese Monk Fa Xian in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. It is more a travel documentary than an exotic sceneries miracle stories; and place-legends. It has been regarded as one of the most significant classics that probed into the South Asian culture, religion. This paper deals with James Legge’s English translation of Fo Guo Ji from the perspective of translation ecology. Eco-translatology is put forward by Michael Cronin and met with new result when Hong Kong scholar Hu Gengshen put the three properties of language, to be exact, the characteristics of variability of language in both language structure and context is possible, it follows negotiability in the process of using language and the adaptability is required in eco-environment setting. In light of eco-translation theory, this paper aims at exploring the factors influencing James Legge’s English translation by analysizing the text as well as providing a new angle to interpret James Legge’s translation to Chinese classics.</em>

Labels, Histories, Politics: Indian/South Asian Dance on the Global Stage

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVANTHI MEDURI
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The South ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk

In this paper, I discuss issues revolving around history, historiography, alterity, difference and otherness concealed in the doubled Indian/South Asian label used to describe Indian/South Asian dance genres in the UK. The paper traces the historical genealogy of the South Asian label to US, Indian and British contexts and describes how the South Asian enunciation fed into Indian nation-state historiography and politics in the 1950s. I conclude by describing how Akademi: South Asian Dance, a leading London based arts organisation, explored the ambivalence in the doubled Indian/South Asian label by renaming itself in 1997, and forging new local/global networks of communication and artistic exchange between Indian and British based dancers and choreographers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

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