Hong Kong English

DC-HKE

Welcome!

According to Schneider, Hong Kong English (HKE) progressed from the phase of exonormative stabilization into the phase of nativisation in the 1960s (Schneider, 2007, p. 137) . However, with the socio-political changes since 1997 and the fact that the colony has never gained independence – which is a crucial event in the development of a post-colonial variety – it is possible that English in Hong Kong is now developing from a second-language variety to a foreign language (Görlach, 2002). Overall, the status of HKE as a distinct variety remains contested. Thus, the emergence (and possible loss) of any variety-specific features can only be traced by analysing English in Hong Kong through time, for which a diachronic corpus is a necessary precondition. In this DFG-funded project, we undertake a systematic diachronic study of the origins and evolution of English in Hong Kong by building a diachronic corpus of Hong Kong English (DC-HKE). The corpus under development will provide empirical evidence to explore key questions about the evolution, features, and current status of HKE. The text categories selected for the DC-HKE match the corpus design of the LOB-family in order to facilitate comparative studies across varieties, with the numbers being target values.

Cooperation partners

Prof. John Bacon-Shone (Hong Kong University Social Sciences Research Centre)
Prof. Kingsley Bolton
CrossAsia

Genres under development

DC:HKE: Newspaper Discourse

News language continues to evolve in its content and structure to meet diverse social and cultural demands (Conboy 2007: 5) for e.g., news style in Britain has changed from ‘fact-centred’ to a more personal coverage over time (Conboy 2007: 5; Landert, 2014; Temple 2008;). Newspaper discourse in Hong Kong, on the other hand, has evolved differently due to unequal power dynamics between the press and political authorities over centuries. As part of this project, we are collecting and digitizing prominent English-language newspapers from Hong Kong, including The South China Morning Post, The China Mail, and The Hongkong Telegraph, among others. These newspapers provide valuable insights into the historical use and development of English in Hong Kong across different time periods. The digitization process ensures that these archival materials are preserved and made accessible for linguistic analysis, contributing significantly to the construction of the diachronic corpus.

DC-HKE: Business Correspondence

From the very beginnings of the colony, banks and companies (such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Cooperation and Jardine & Matheson) established their head offices in Hong Kong and maintained a regular correspondence with their London office and other branch offices as well as with Hong Kong-based companies. Besides the British senior and foreign staff, local staff was employed and trained for the business. Within the scope of this project we collect, digitise and analyse business letters and colonial reports from as early as the 1860s until today in order to trace the development of this genre in Hong Kong (also in comparison to its development in Great Britain). With this knowledge about genre development, we will be able to correctly assess varietal features emerging in Hong Kong English.

Digitizing Data through OCR

A significant challenge in studying business correspondence is that the data needed is often not easily accessible. Therefore, in its initial stages, a significant part of the project consists of archival work to collect data. The digitization of the letters is done with the help of the software OCR4all, which uses optical character recognition to transform images of type- and handwritten texts into machine-encoded text. Similarly, newspapers from earlier periods are also being digitized with OCR4all, ensuring the integration of older historical texts into the corpus. This critical digitization effort is supported by the Zentrum für Philologie und Digitalität (ZPD) at the University of Würzburg, highlighting their collaboration in advancing this project.