Tag: Accent

How a Hong Kong Accent is Formed

Posted on by Benedict J. L. ROWLETT

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.

Picture 1: The book cover of an old Cantonese book which teaches English
Source: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8421
How Hong Kong people learned English speaking in the past
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.

Tam Jai accent: The Representative of Mandarin Accent Cantonese

Posted on by Benedict J. L. ROWLETT

by Alice Ng

Do you know what is “TamJai accent”?  If you are a good Cantonese speaker and have visited TamJai, you must understand what that is.  But if you don’t, this article will answer the question.

“Tam Jai”, one of Hong Kong’s most popular restaurant chains, serves Yunnanese rice noodles with a wide range of options from base to condiments to spiciness level.  It grasped popularity and expanded to more than 100 stores in recent years.  Interestingly, most of the waiters and waitresses of the restaurant are new migrants from mainland China, as a result, their workers usually speak Cantonese with a Mandarin accent and it is considered as the “Tam Jai accent”. The accent often makes changes in meaning and is seen as a joke, for example, mak yun(墨丸) which mean cuttlefish ball, become mat yin(勿演) meaning don’t act; juk sing(竹笙) meaning bamboo fungus originally, become chuk sing(畜牲)and give a new meaning: beast.  

Tam Jai Restaurant

Although it started to be a discriminatory joke which made fun of the distortion of meaning, it turned out to be a popular characteristic of the store and gained its popularity.  It is popular for Hong Kong youtuber to take video clips to imitate the accent and share their experience in the shop.  The accent was not only filmed in soap opera and tv commercial, but also characterized into an animation character in the Chinese version of a Japanese game Food Fantasy(食之契约 / フードファンタジー) as Hong Kong feature food.  

Local actor using TamJai accent in the TV commercial
The sound actress performing TamJai accent

However, some voices argue that the accent is inappropriate and would affect the use of proper Cantonese.  When the abovementioned game released, many local players argue the appropriacy of using such accent to represent Hong Kong.  Hong Kong people generally hold negative attitude towards Mandarin and Mandarin accent.  There are views that new immigrants, often associated with Mandarin accent, strain Hong Kong’s resources in welfare, education, and land level without much contribution to the society and economy or even attempting to adapt to the local community.  It is common for people to think that mainland immigrants are under-educated and not culturally civilized.  The stereotyping affects mainland accent users in workplace, school and even community.  News media, especially those with a democratic stand, would even report negative news like frauds and injury cases with an emphasis of the accent of the suspect.  

It is often to hear that language reflect one’s identity.  In the case of Hong Kong, proper Cantonese represents the difference in family background.  As illustrated by a legislation council member, Ho Kai-ming, in the following video, Hong Kong is actually a city that full of immigrants.  He makes use of TamJai accent as an example of inaccuracy of Cantonese pronunciation to highlight the relationship between immigration policy and Cantonese.  The Cantonese used in Hong Kong nowadays is highly influenced by immigrants back in the 18thand 19th century.  As a result, the language used by the majority native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong largely differ from Cantonese used in Guangdong province which is considered as the standardized version of Cantonese.  Furthermore, the concept of new immigrants did not emerge until the handover to China in 1997, and hence, I can say that the standard language in Hong Kong is actually a “Hong Kong accent Cantonese” and whether you are able to speck in Cantonese without a heavy Mandarin accent do not necessarily reflect you are Cantonese-native or not, but how long you have moved into Hong Kong.

If you can speak both languages, you must understand that although Cantonese is regarded as a dialect by many Mandarin speakers, it greatly differs from Mandarin in terms of pronunciation, intonation, grammatical structure, romanization system and expression which make the two not mutually intelligible.  It is appreciativethat those workers at least try to use Cantonese to communicate with costumers and each others even though it is difficult to learn it and every locals in Hong Kong are supposed to know Mandarin.  It is important for us to understand that the accent isn’t a symbol of alienation, but a process of assimilation for them to culturally accommodate into the society.  To judge a person simply by how well he/she use a language is never a smart thing to do.  

See for reference

Hong Kong’s popular Tam Chai Yunnan Noodle to be bought by Japanese group

Hong Kong accents – The Characteristics of Hong Kong English

Posted on by Benedict J. L. ROWLETT

by Christy Chow

Cr. Language Contact

English is one of the official languages in Hong Kong, which is significantly used in the Government, business sector and educational sector. It is not uncommon to see the bilingual road and government signs along the street. Hong Kong had been a colony of Britain and was under British rule from 1841. Before the handover of Hong Kong From Britain to China, Hong Kong had been immersing in an English environment in which using English for communication became gradually common. However, due to the influence of native Cantonese speaker, people in Hong Kong developed a unique accent when speaking English. 

According to the study of Swell (2012), there are a few consonantal features in Hong Kong English. In this blog, some of the major features will be explained briefly to introduce Hong Kong English. 

1) [n] / [l] conflation

The use of [l] in place of [n] is rather more common than the inverse, and it may be associated with the recent changes in Cantonese in which there is progressive use of traditional words that began with [n] to [l]. For example, in Hong Kong English, people may pronounce the word ‘l’eed instead of ‘n’eed, ‘l’ever instead of ‘n’ever. 

2) TH-

This is a very typical type of accent characteristic of Hong Kong English. It has been extensively observed that the voiceless TH is occasionally pronounced as [f] in Hong Kong English. Furthermore, this observation is observed under different situations such as the pronunciation of voiceless TH in initial, medial and final position. For instance, in initial position, very often Hong Kong people pronounce ‘think’ /θɪŋk/ as /fɪŋk/. Seemingly, for ‘thank’, people often pronounce it as /fæŋk/ instead of /θæŋk/. While for the medial position, it is also uncommon to see people pronounce ‘something’ (/ˈsʌm.θɪŋ/) as ‘someting’ (/ˈsʌm.tɪŋ /), in which the voiceless TH is pronounced as [t] sound. Lastly, in the final position, there are also words that we normally pronounced them wrongly. Take ‘youth’ as an example, we often mispronounce the -TH as [f] instead of [θ]. 

3) Final consonant cluster

There is a trend in Hong Kong in the simplification of final consonant clusters, specifically with the exclusion of final consonant. However, we should note that this is not only the characteristic of Hong Kong English but also a universal feature of spoken English. And in fact, Hong Kong English speakers actually omit the [t] in word phrase less often than speakers from other countries. For example, we can take a look at the words with a word-final plosive, [t], [d] or [k]. In word phrases such as ‘most of’, ‘friend and’ and ‘think it’s’, the [t], [d] and [k] in respective word phrase are deleted. One noticeable feature is that in the word phrase ‘kind of’, the [d] is omitted nearly in every case. 

4) Initial consonant cluster

People in Hong Kong often confused between the pronunciation of [l] and [r]. Indeed, when [r] is the second sound in a consonant cluster, in most instances the [r] would be pronounced as [l]. For example, the word crowded /ˈkraʊ.dɪd/ is often pronounced as /klaʊdId/, and please /pli:z/ as /pi:z/. While on the other hand, there is also a replacement or omission of [r] and [l] in some words. As in the word ‘applied’, people pronounce it as /əˈpaɪd/ instead of /əˈplaɪd/. Another example is that ‘primary’ is pronounced as /ˈpaɪ.mər.i/ instead of /ˈpraɪ.mər.i/.

5) L-vocalization or deletion

This is the most common characteristic of Hong Kong English. Most of the time, Hong Kong people pronounce the words such as ‘will’ from /wɪl/ to /wɪu/ and ‘oral’ from /ˈɔː.rəl/ to /ˈɔː.rəu/, that is a use of vowel which is an l-vocalization. Besides l-vocalization, there is also l-deletion rather than replacement after a back vowel. For instance, ‘call’ is pronounced as /kɔ/ instead of /kɔːl/ and ‘cool’ is pronounced as /ku/ instead of /kuːl/. Vocalization of [l] is actually really common like Singapore also has this kind of problem. 

To conclude, the characteristics of Hong Kong English accents are obvious. If you go to another country and speak English, people would probably think you are a Hongkonger! However, what we need to know is that there is always variation between things, so as languages. English can be spoken with a Hong Kong accent or it can be spoken professionally when you are in a formal situation. It depends on the context of history or culture. More importantly, Hong Kong accent makes us identify us as a Hongkonger!

References

Deterding, D., Wong, J., & Kirkpatrick, A. (2008). The pronunciation of Hong Kong English. English World-Wide, 29(2), 148-175.

Sewell, A. (2012). The Hong Kong English accent: Variation and acceptability. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13(2), 1-21.