Tag: British Crown Colony

Hong Kong Cantonese VS Guangzhou Cantonese

Yidan

As a big fan of Hong Kong TV dramas, movies and songs, I always admire people from Guangdong province where Cantonese is a major lingua franca. They understand Hong Kong Cantonese dramas without subtitles, sing Cantonese songs and communicate with people from Hong Kong without any barrier. According to Norman, Cantonese is considered the prestige variety of Yue Chinese variants, based on the dialect of Guangzhou City (Canto) and the surrounding areas including Guangdong and Guangxi province, Hong Kong and Macau (p.215, 1988). However, a question has always lingered in my mind: is there any difference between Hong Kong Cantonese and Guangzhou Cantonese? After research and observation, I find that there are mainly two differences to help distinguish Hong Kong and Guangzhou Cantonese. 

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Hong Kong hotel life

Mela

A burst of blog posts blew into Educational Sociolinguistics in the brief time it took technology to blow me westward to the far East for a week of encounters with extraordinary scholars at the Education University of Hong Kong. A brief time by the calendar, but long in subjective time, measured by the innumerable back-and-forth fractions of an inch that make up all the movement possible in the cramped quarters one is confined to when flying for fifteen hours over the wide Pacific.

While I was uncramping over the weekend, the contributors to this blog were writing about sexism in Chinese and racism in English (the term “bootlicking bilingualism” particularly stood out for me as deserving of a wide public) and applying their knowledge of pragmatics across a range of tricky situations from snack ordering to sales pitching. The blog has been busy. Posts about poetry and how untranslatable it is—along with most of the really interesting language out there—have been flooding in. 

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