Cantonese (Gu?ngd?ng Hu?), a dialect of Chinese, has origins in the city of
Canton (now usually Guangzhou), the capital of Guangdong Province and its
surrounding localities in Southern China. Since the province was also known as Yue,
Cantonese was also given the name Yue Yu in Chinese. These names, however, are
somewhat ambiguous, for such other dialects as Hakka, Teochew also prevail in
Guangdong Province. Therefore, Cantonese speakers often call their dialect
Gu?ngzh?u Hu?, literally the dialect spoken in Guangzhou.
The people of Hong Kong mainly speak Cantonese. Insomuch as Hong Kong
was a colony of Britain until 1997 after China’s defeat in the First Opium War
(1839-1841), many a great Western, British in particular, institutions and thoughts
were introduced to Hong Kong. The city has had a different way of life as well as
socio-economic systems from those in Mainland China. The divergence was
sharpened after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, for the
colony was politically disconnected from the mainland. Variations in vocabulary
and pronunciation are therefore found in the Cantonese in Hong Kong. A new
‘language’ termed Computer-mediated Communication Language (CMC) has even
newly emerged in recent years on the Internet as a result of economic progress and
technological innovation in late twentieth century Hong Kong. This research is
aimed at dealing with the Cantonese variety in Hong Kong.
This thesis begins with a fresh attempt to redefine Cantonese. In the second
chapter, the rise of the Cantonese variety in Hong Kong will be analysed from sundry
perspectives, including politics, economics, history, culture, lifestyle, and the
development of information technology. Different Cantonese variants will, too, be
categorised and explained.
The following three issues will be analysed in detail in three separate chapters: 1)
puns used in advertisements or news headline; 2) CMC; 3) variants of Cantonese in
Hong Kong newspapers and magazines. Attention will also be paid to
code-switching and loanword adaptation from English and Japanese etc.
The last chapter is a conclusion, which restates that the Cantonese variety in
Hong Kong has developed via the process of self-creation, internal selection as well
as adaption of foreign words and phrases. Also, it briefly summarises the
relationship between the Hong Kong Cantonese variety and the social context in
which they are used. It ends with a short discussion about the standardisation of
dialects. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:HKU/oai:hub.hku.hk:10722/183327 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Cheung, Kai-yin, 張啟彥 |
| Publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) |
| Source Sets | Hong Kong University Theses |
| Language | Chinese |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PG_Thesis |
| Source | http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B4786946X |
| Rights | The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works., Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License |
| Relation | HKU Theses Online (HKUTO) |
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