is a type of linguistic behaviour that juxtaposes "passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or sub-systems, within the same exchange". Code-switching in Hong Kong mainly concerns two grammatical systems: Cantonese and English. According to Matrix Language Frame Model, Cantonese, as the "matrix language", contributes bound morphemes, content and function words, whereas, English, the "embedded language", contributes lexical, phrases or compound words. Distinctions still exist, albeit subtle, among "Hong Kong English", "borrowing", "code-mixing" and "code-switching". The definition of Hong Kong English is controversial, as to whether it is a type of learner language or a new variety of English. Nevertheless, it belongs to the domain of English. "Borrowing" or "loanwords" refers to words taken from another languages after the process of phonological and morphological assimilation. Borrowed items are supposed to be so deeply entrenched into the base language that speakers are not always conscious of their foreign origin. "Code-mixing" and "code-switching", on the other hand, incur less integration into the base language and speakers sometimes are aware of the coexistence of two systems. Various units can be involved in the process, from single words to longer elements such as phrases and clauses. Early works on this phenomenon in Hong Kong reserve "code-mixing" for intra-sentential alternation between Cantonese and English and "code-switching" for the inter-sentential alternation. Nevertheless, "code-mixing" has been gradually stigmatised, implying the incompetence of the bilingual speakers in either or both languages. As a result, "code-switching" tends to be employed as the umbrella term for both alternations, although the intra-sentential mode is predominant among Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese. Code-switching, deemed as less formal than pure English or Cantonese, appears mostly in interaction between peers. Still, this phenomenon occurs in written media, including local magazines, popular entertainment books, columns in newspapers and advertisements, especially on technology or business administrationrelated topics.
Social background
The history of British colonisation and the tradition of bilingualism since then exert significant influence on linguistic situations in Hong Kong.
For individual Hong Kong people, even after the handover to the People's Republic of China in 1997, the status of English remains both a cultural and symbolic capital. The fact that they code-switch, continue to use traditional Chinese characters, and accord high "prestige value" to English, signals the gesture of maintaining a separate identity from mainland China.
Linguistic features of code-switching in Hong Kong
Phonetics/phonology
Different segments of English words undergo phonological changes when mixed into Cantonese, affecting vowels, single initial and final consonants, initial and final consonant clusters. Stress of original codes is also subject to shift in some cases.
Syntax
The English elements engaged in the code-switching process are mostly of one or two words in length, and are usually content words that can fit into the surrounding Cantonese phrase fairly easily, like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and occasionally, adverbs. Examples are like:
去canteen食飯
好多嘢press你
我唔sure
幫我check一check啊
Meanwhile, structure words like determiners, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs almost never appear alone in the predominantly Cantonese discourse, which explains the ungrammaticality of two節. English lexical items, on the other hand, are frequently assimilated into Cantonese grammar. For instances,
兩part, "part" would lose its plural morpheme "s" as do its counterpart in Cantonese.
equip 咗, "equip" is followed by a Cantonese perfective aspect marker. A more evident case of the syntactic assimilation would be where a negation marker is inserted into an English compound adjective or verb to form yes-no questions in Cantonese.
佢可唔可愛呀？ is pure Cantonese while a sentence like 佢cu唔cute啊？ is a typical example of the assimilation.
For English elements consisting of two words or more, they generally retain English grammar internally without disrupting the surrounding Cantonese grammar like,
唔駛再搵part-time job啦
.
Motivations
The first major framework dichotomises motivations of code-switching in Hong Kong into "expedient mixing" and "orientational mixing". For expedient mixing, the speaker would turn to English if the correspondent "low Cantonese" expression is not available and the existing "high Cantonese" expression sounds too formal. In the case of orientational mixing, despite the presence of both "high" and "low" expression, the speaker could still resort to English if the subject is perceived to be inherently more 'Western'. The following list elaborates and summaries the distinction between English,"High Cantonese", "Low Cantonese" and Code-Switching. Taxonomy identifies four specific motivations, including euphemism, the principle of economy, specificity and bilingual punning.
Euphemism
The English counterpart is preferred if the speaker finds the explicit Cantonese expression culturally embarrassing, like breasts of females or open expression of personal feelings. Therefore, in the example of 透bra格格, "bra" replaces its Cantonese counterparts.
Principle of economy
English is also preferred if it would require less linguistic effort in comparison with its Cantonese equivalent. Instead of code-switching and using "check-in" in expressions like 你check咗in未？, people will have to use the pure Cantonese expression 辦理登機手續, which contains six syllables.
Specificity
Proper names and technical terms are likely to appear in its original language, like "lock brake", "kick down", and "power shift" in auto magazines. English is either used to fill the lexical gap where generally accepted Chinese translation is unavailable, or to avoid confusion if one single English term has different versions of translation in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Bilingual punning
Bilingual punning makes the use of similarity in pronunciation between English and Cantonese to attract attention, especially for advertisements. In particular, 'fun' is frequently used as it forms almost completehomophonous with the Cantonese characters like 分 and 紛. Examples include the slang of "high tech 揩嘢，low tech 撈嘢 " and a promotion slogan of "英文多fun日 ". In the extended version this taxonomy, "quotation in the original code", "doubling of the same expression in two codes for emphasis" and "English interjections inserted into Cantonese" are also included.
