Spoken Language In Hong Kong

For decades, languages have been changed all the time, because of conquest, migration, trade and so on. Through those ways, speakers of one language would be brought into contacting with speakers who speak different languages. In some cases, people only borrow a few words from their own language to express their though; in others, a new language may be formed by people to communicate with each other. Therefore, different languages can have different outcomes. In China, this contact situation is quite a bit more general, especially in Hong Kong. As a meeting place between China and the West for more than one and a half centuries, Hong Kong has witnessed different modes of language contact. Under a high degree of extensive contact with each other, Cantonese has borrowed from English a large number of loan words， but no grammar. Given the intensive contact with Cantonese in Hong Kong, Hakka and Southern Min have been under Cantonese influence regarding phonology, lexicon, and sentence structure. The first case is talking about the contact of Chinese languages in HongKong. In the early history of HongKong, there were three totally different languages —— Hakka, Southern Min, and Cantonese. After HongKong was ceded to the Unite Kingdom, Kingdom colonial Government initially offered language schools that provided Cantonese and Hakka（1）， according to the different needs of the Chinese communities. Even though languages of Hong Kong boasts many languages, the contact between languages is still limited. When people need to communicate with each other, translators always play an important role. In addition, Pidgin can also act as a simple tool to communicate. Therefore, to some extent, the arrival of Europeans and English in China made contact with Chinese languages more closed. After Hong Kong was open to the outside world, there were considerable gaps between colonists and Chinese. The colonists were very arrogant while Chinese were also proud and unbending. In that situation, there is almost no contact between each other 's language. However, missionaries are an exception. In order to spread Christianity, they were willing to …show more content…
Thus, there are three types of spoken language. In other words, the Mandarin entered the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as the national language. In Hong kong history, Shandong dialect and Beijing Mandarin also came to Hong Kong in the past. They experienced the deep contact with Cantonese and eventually were absorbed by the Cantonese. But since the reunification, the Mandarin found living space in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. New immigrants from mainland China settled in Hong Kong, and they always speak Mandarin and fluent English. Cantonese was used rarely in their daily lives. Before Hong Kong returned, some scholars have expressed concern about the future status of the Cantonese language [13]. Since the establishment of the Special Administrative Region, the relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin is only superficial contact, and mutual influence will be seen in terms of lexical borrowing. Unless the SAR Government through the use enforcement tools on Cantonese, the Cantonese and Mandarin still need some time to experience from superficial contact developing into deeper contact. But because of "unchanged for 50 years", Mandarin did not threaten the Cantonese. However, the English position was challenged by the Mandarin in Hong Kong. Over ten years (from 2001 to 2011) Mandarin against