Hong Kong Cantonese - Code-switching and Loanword Adaptation

Code-switching and Loanword Adaptation

Hong Kong Cantonese has a high number of foreign loanwords. Sometimes, the part of speech of the incorporated words are also changed, like "佢地好friend", translated into English as "they are very 'friend'", means "they are good friends". The word "friend" is changed from a noun into an adjective. 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" in English, but it means "trendy" when being incorporated into Hong Kong Cantonese. However, 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 means computer monitor. And some new Cantonese lexical items are created according to the morphology 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 Cantonese phonotactics.

Incorporating words from foreign languages into Cantonese is also acceptable by 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 "it 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. In the case of some technological terms, code-mixing becomes very hard to avoid. For example, Hong Kong people find it difficult to say “你用個 mau₁-si₂ right-click嚟highlight啲字” (“You use the right-click of the mouse to highlight the words”) in pure Cantonese. It is actually not surprising if a Hong Konger does not know how to express "mouse", "right-click" and "highlight" in Chinese. Code-mixing is almost unavoidable for some technical terms like "trial balance" in accounting and "benzene" in chemistry because of the use of English as the medium of instruction at the tertiary level and oftentimes the secondary level. Many people in Hong Kong do not know the Chinese names of many technical terms and as a result, it is expected that English names of the terms be used. This is also a headache of prescriptive linguists and Chinese teachers who advocate the use of pure Cantonese. Code-mixing is in general not a problem but it could impose a language barrier between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese as the former do not know the Chinese names of the terms while the latter, the English of the terms.