By Stephen Evans
This ebook offers an empirically-grounded sociolinguistic background of the English language in Hong Kong long ago one hundred seventy years. utilizing significant units of diachronic and synchronic info, it lines the altering prestige and capabilities of English in terms of spoken Cantonese, Mandarin and written chinese language within the key domain names of presidency, schooling and company. the writer tracks the increase of English-knowing bilingualism within the city’s chinese language neighborhood and explores the evolutionary dynamics of Hong Kong English. He additionally speculates at the way forward for English within the territory, relatively after 2047 while the ‘one state, structures’ framework proven via the Sino-British Joint announcement is dismantled. Researchers and scholars operating within the fields of sociolinguistics, English as a world language, international Englishes, utilized linguistics and English-language schooling will locate this ebook presents beneficial info and insights concerning the makes use of and clients of English in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong. extra more often than not, it makes a distinct contribution to the literature at the diffusion and diversification of English worldwide.
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Additional info for The English Language in Hong Kong: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives
Sample text
5 This analysis made it possible to discern trends in language choice since the revocation of the English-only rule. 4 presents the proportion of turns in English and Cantonese each year between 24 S. EVANS 100 90 80 70 Percentage 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1843 1850 1865 1896 1929 1946 1956 1964 1973 1983 1985 1991 1995 2000 2012 2016 Chinese Non-Chinese Fig. 3 Proportion of Chinese and non-Chinese members of the Legislative Council (1843–2016) 1971–1972 and 2001–2002, that is, the key period of change (hence the omission of the final 10-year period covered by the corpus, during which the pattern established by the turn of the millennium continued unaltered and bore no imprint of Putonghua).
Two months after the handover, the HKSAR government—perhaps emboldened by the sense of legitimacy its lame-duck predecessor evidently lacked—issued its Firm Guidance to schools on the MOI (Education Department, 1997), which paved the way for the much-criticised, language-based bifurcation of schools between 1998 and 2009. The policy is historically significant because it was the first time that schools had been stripped of their decision-making power over the MOI and that students had been denied access to EMI on the basis of academic ability, since the 112 EMI schools, hardly coincidentally, admitted the city’s brightest students (Choi, 2003).
As such members knew that after 1997 Council membership would be determined by election (direct or indirect), appointees who wished to remain in the legislature in the new era had to demonstrate soli- 26 S. EVANS darity with prospective electors, be they in a geographical or a functional constituency. This was best accomplished in Cantonese rather than in the language of their departing patrons. Notwithstanding the forces impelling the use of Cantonese in the early 1990s, it was only in 1996–1997 that Hong Kong’s common language became the default medium of proceedings: in the previous year, around 60 % of the turns had still been in English.