by Victoria Chan
Most of the English learners in Hong Kong admire a British accent. When Hong Kong people can speak in British accent naturally and fluently, they always receive compliments such as “ Wow! Your English is so good!” or “ I love your accent! It is so beautiful!”. Most of the people deem British English as the standard English. In other words, people who is not able to speak in British accent are regarded as having low proficiency in English. The official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English. It has a long history of learning English as a second language. Under this circumstances, why Hong Kong accent still exist despite its wide use of English?
When Hong Kong became a crown colony of the United Kingdom, Hong Kong people needed to learn English because the colonial government announced English as the official language of Hong Kong. Hardly could the Hong Kong people learn English at that time due to the difference between Cantonese and English. Moreover, education in Hong Kong was not popular due to the limited expenditure to schooling by the local government. In other words, Hong Kong’s proficiency in English was low as the government failed to provide proper assistance to the new language policy. Under this circumstance, the Hong Kong people needed to learn English by themselves.
The main use of English was to communicate with English speakers in Hong Kong during the colonial period. Therefore, the most efficient way to learn English was to simply imitate the pronunciation of English through speaking Cantonese. The following figure is an old Cantonese book which aims to teach Hong Kong people English daily expressions through speaking Cantonese.
Source: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8421
Source: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8421
The title of the book is “ 自學英語不求人“ which means “ Self-learning English without asking anybody”. It shows that Hong Kong people couldn’t receive efficient English education despite the issue of official language policy. From the above picture, it shows how Hong Kong people learnt English at that time. The writer helps the reader to pronounce the English expression through generating a Cantonese sentences which has similar pronunciation with it. For example, “ 打孻亞見 Daa Laai Ah gin” for “ Try again”. Although it is written in traditional Chinese, the imitation doesn’t make sense if we pronounce it in Mandarin. The reader has to pronounce the Chinese sentence in Cantonese in order to imitate the English pronunciation. Moreover, these Chinese sentences are neither grammatical nor related to the English expression. It only helps the readers to generate the pronunciation of the English expressions. The Hong Kong accent is formed because the learners don’t imitate the pronunciation of a native speaker. On the other hand, they find their own way to pronounce English with the help of Cantonese.
Not to mention that English education in Hong Kong focuses primarily on reading and writing, the accent is not important if the speaker can use a wide range of vocabulary to express his or her ideas. A study on phonological awareness and oral language proficiency in Hong Kong by the University of Hong Kong discovered that the tone of first language will contribute significantly to second language. The reason why English accent of Hong Kong people differs from British is because of the difference of subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme) in English and Cantonese. If children fail to develop phonological awareness (developing across levels of different phonological units) in early age, their accent of English will be similar to the tone of Cantonese.
After discovering how Hong Kong accent is formed, we can also explore the method to improve our English accent. The sooner the children learn phonics of English, the higher phonological awareness they can achieve. In other words, the best way to improve English accent is not about imitating the pronunciation of each word, but to understand and to acquire the whole system of the phonics of English. This suggests that there is a need for reform of English learning in Hong Kong. Instead of pushing children to learn difficult words in a very young age, we should teach the children phonics before spelling. Thus, we can help our children to immerse themselves in English completely as their mother tongue.
Language Culture and Society in Hong Kong (and beyond) 
I think it is interesting how people tried to learn English through translating the words into Chinese words which have similar pronunciations. At the same time, I also think that Hong Kong accent shows the uniqueness of Hong Kong people and we should not be embarrassed that we cannot speak “good English”. But if we were to talk about why Hong Kong people cannot speak the British accent, I would say that Hong Kong’s education contributes to that as most of the English teachers in Hong Kong are not British. When the teachers can’t even speak British accent, how can the students learn to speak in a British way?
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This is an interesting topic. I was trying to read the book through the pictures and actually did see how it could have helped at the time. It sure shows how the accent was developed. I think acquiring an accent comes from your surroundings. Say if you were studying in a British based school, your peers and teachers would have that accent and you soon merge with their accent as well.
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