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Hong Kong Cantonese is a dialect ofCantonese spoken primarily in Hong Kong. As the most commonly spoken language in Hong Kong, it shares a recent and direct lineage with the Guangzhou (Canton) dialect.

Due to thecolonial heritage of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Cantonese exhibits distinct differences in vocabulary and certain speech patterns. Over the years, Hong Kong Cantonese has also absorbed foreignterminology and developed a large set of Hong Kong-specific terms.Code-switching with English is also common.

As of 2021, 88.2% of Hong Kong's population identified Cantonese as their "usual spoken language," while 93.7% reported being able to speak it.^[1]

Hong Kong Cantonese is predominantly referred to as "Cantonese" in English andgwong2 dung1 waa2 (廣東話,lit. Guangdong speech) by its native speakers, while the government also officially refers to it asgwong2 zau1 waa2 (廣州話,lit. Guangzhou speech).[1]

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Before thearrival of British settlers in 1842, the inhabitants of Hong Kong mainly spoke theDongguan-Bao'an (Tungkun–Po'on)^[2] and Tanka dialects of Yue, as well asHakka^[3] andHokkien. These languages and dialects are all remarkably different from Guangzhou Cantonese, and notmutually intelligible.

After the British acquiredHong Kong Island,Kowloon Peninsula and theNew Territories from theQing in 1841 (officially 1842) and 1898, large numbers^[quantify] of merchants and workers came to Hong Kong from the city ofCanton, the main centre of Cantonese. Cantonese became the dominant spoken language in Hong Kong. The extensive migration from mainland Cantonese-speaking areas to Hong Kong continued up until 1949, when theCommunists took overmainland China.

In 1949, the year that the People's Republic of China was established, Hong Kong saw a large influx of refugees from mainland China, prompting theHong Kong Government to close its border.^{[citation needed]} Illegal immigration from mainland China into Hong Kong nevertheless continued. During the 1950s, the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong remained very similar to that in Canton, but the proportion of Cantonese speakers did not surpass 50% of the population in Hong Kong.^[2]

Movement, communication and relations between Hong Kong and mainland China became very limited, and consequently the evolution of Cantonese in Hong Kong diverged from that of Guangzhou. In mainland China, the use ofMandarin as the official language and in education was enforced. In Hong Kong, Cantonese was themedium of instruction in schools, along withwritten English and written Chinese. As such, since the 1970s the percentage of Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong has risen to about 90%.^[2]

Because of the long exposure to English during the colonial period, a large number ofEnglish words wereloaned into Hong Kong Cantonese, e.g. "巴士" (IPA: /páːsǐː/, CantoneseJyutping:baa¹ si²), from the English "bus"; compare this with the equivalent fromStandard Mandarin,公共汽車 (Jyutping:gung1 gung6 hei3 ce1;pinyin:gōnggòng qìchē). Consequently, the vocabularies of Cantonese in mainland China and Hong Kong substantially differ.^[2] Moreover, the pronunciation of Cantonese changed while the change either did not occur in mainland China or took place much more slowly. For example, merging of initial/n/ into/l/ and the deletion of/ŋ/ were observed.

In modern-day Hong Kong, many native speakers no longer distinguish between certain phoneme pairs, leading to instances of sound change through mergers. Although considered non-standard and denounced as "lazy sound" (懶音) by purists, the phenomena are widespread and not restricted to Hong Kong.^[4] Contrary to impressions, some of these changes are not recent. The loss of the velar nasal (/ŋ/) was documented by Williams (1856), and the substitution of the liquid nasal (/l/) for the nasal initial (/n/) was documented by Cowles (1914).

List of observed shifts:^[5]

• Merging of/n/ initial into/l/ initial.
• Merging of/ŋ/ initial into null initial.
• Merging of/kʷ/ and/kʷʰ/ initials into/k/ and/kʰ/ when followed by/ɔː/. Note that/ʷ/ is the onlyglide (介音) in Cantonese.
• Merging of/ŋ/ and/k/ codas into/n/ and/t/ codas respectively, eliminating contrast between these pairs of finals (except after/e/ and/o/^{[clarification needed]}):/aːn/-/aːŋ/,/aːt/-/aːk/,/ɐn/-/ɐŋ/,/ɐt/-/ɐk/,/ɔːn/-/ɔːŋ/ and/ɔːt/-/ɔːk/.
• Merging of the two syllabic nasals,/ŋ̩/ into/m̩/, eliminating the contrast of sounds between吳 (surname Ng) and唔 (not).
• Merging of the rising tones (陰上 2nd and陽上 5th).^[6]

In educated Hong Kong Cantonese speech, these sound mergers are avoided, and many older speakers still distinguish between those phoneme categories. With the sound changes, the name of Hong Kong'sHang Seng Bank (香港恆生銀行),Jyutping:Hoeng¹ gong² hang⁴ sang¹ ngan⁴ hong⁴,/hœ́ːŋkɔ̌ːŋhɐ̏ŋsɐ́ŋŋɐ̏nhɔ̏ːŋ/, literallyHong Kong Constant Growth Bank, becomes/hœ́ːnkɔ̌ːnhɐ̏nsɐ́nɐ̏nhɔ̏ːn/, sounding likeHon' Kon' itchy body 'un cold ('香港'痕身un寒). The name of Cantonese itself (廣東話, "Guangdong speech") would beJyutping:Gwong² dung¹ waa²,IPA:/kʷɔ̌ːŋtʊ́ŋwǎː/ without the merger, whereas/kɔ̌ːŋtʊ́ŋwǎː/ (sounding like "講東話": "say eastern speech") and/kɔ̌ːntʊ́ŋwǎː/ (sounding like "趕東話" : "chase away eastern speech") are overwhelmingly common in Hong Kong.^[7]

The shiftaffects the way some Hong Kong people speak other languages as well. This is especially evident in the pronunciation of certain English names: "Nicole" pronounce[lekˈkou̯], "Nancy" pronounce[ˈlɛnsi] etc. A very common example of the mixing of/n/ and/l/ is that of the word你, meaning "you". Even though the standard pronunciation should be/nei/, the word is often pronounced/lei/, which is the surname李, or the word理, meaning theory. The merger of/n/ and/l/ also affects the choice of characters when the Cantonese mediatransliterates foreign names.^{[citation needed]}

Prescriptivists whotry to correct these "lazy sounds" often end up introducinghypercorrections. For instance, while attempting to ensure that people pronounce the initial/ŋ/, they may introduce it into words which have historically had a null-initial.^[4] One common example is that of the word愛, meaning "love", where even though the standard pronunciation is Jyutping:oi³, IPA:/ɔ̄ːi/, the word is often pronounced Jyutping:ngoi³,/ŋɔ̄ːi/. A similar phenomenon occurs in various Mandarin dialects (e.g.Southwestern Mandarin).^[8]

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Hong Kong Cantonese has developed a number of phrases and expressions that are unique to the context of Hong Kong. Examples are:

Life in Hong Kong is characterised by the blending of southern Chinese with other Asian and Western cultures, as well as the city's position as a major international business centre. In turn, Hong Kong influences have spread widely into other cultures. As a result, a large number ofloanwords are created in Hong Kong and then exported to mainland China,Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan. Some of the loanwords have become even more popular than their Chinese counterparts, in Hong Kong as well as in their destination cultures.^{[citation needed]} Note that some of the loanwords are being used much more frequently in Cantonese-speaking areas in mainland China (e.g. Guangzhou), than in areas speaking other Chinese varieties.

Selected loanwords^[9] are shown below.

Hong Kong Cantonese has a high number of foreignloanwords. Sometimes, theparts of speech of the incorporated words are changed. In some examples, some new meanings of English words are even created. For example, "至yeah", literally "the most yeah", means "the trendiest". Originally, "yeah" means "yes/okay" in English, but it means "trendy" when being incorporated into Hong Kong Cantonese (Cf. "yeah baby" and French "yé-yé").

Semantic change is common in loanwords; when foreign words are borrowed into Cantonese, polysyllabic words and monosyllabic words tend to become disyllabic, and the second syllable is in the Upper Rising tone (the second tone). For example, "kon₁ si₂" (coins), "sek⁶ kiu¹" (security) and "ka¹ si²" (cast). A few polysyllabic words become monosyllabic though, like "mon¹" (monitor), literally meanscomputer monitor. And some new Cantoneselexical items are created according to themorphology of Cantonese. For example, "laai¹記" from the word "library". Most of the disyllabic words and some of the monosyllabic words are incorporated as their original pronunciation, with some minor changes according to the Cantonesephonotactics.

Incorporating words from foreign languages into Cantonese is acceptable to most Cantonese speakers. Hong Kong Cantonese speakers frequently code-mix although they can distinguish foreign words from Cantonese ones. For instance, "噉都唔 make sense", literally means "that doesn't make sense". After a Cantonese speaker decides to code-mix a foreign word in a Cantonese sentence,syntactical rules of Cantonese will be followed. For instance, "sure" (肯定) can be used like "你 su¹唔 su¹ aa³?" (are you sure?) as if it were its Cantonese counterpart "你肯唔肯定?", using the A-not-A question construction.

In some circumstances, code-mixing is preferable because it can simplify sentences. An excellent example (though dated) of the convenience and efficiency of such mixing is "打 collect call" replacing "打一個由對方付款嘅長途電話", i.e. 13 syllables reduced to four.^[11]

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Abbreviations are commonly used in Hong Kong and have flourished with the use of short messaging over the Internet. Some examples:

• Bilingualism in Hong Kong
• Cantonese profanity
• Code-switching in Hong Kong
• Proper Cantonese pronunciation
• Comparison of national standards of Chinese
• Hong Kong English
• The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, whose Cantonese Romanization Scheme is known asJyutping
• Varieties of Chinese

• Zee, Eric (1991)."Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese)". Illustrations of the IPA.Journal of the International Phonetic Association.21 (1):46–48.doi:10.1017/S0025100300006058.

• Learn Cantonese (with Cantonese-English / English-Cantonese Dictionary)
• Learn Chinese with Chinese Lyrics Now with Pinyin and sound files
• Jyutping romanisation of Cantonese reading of Chinese characters using in Hong Kong

• Languages of Hong Kong
• Cantonese language
• City colloquials

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