Monday, January 08, 2007

The languages of Hong Kong

From my perspective, in order of prevalence, the languages spoken in Hong Kong are:

1) Cantonese (广东话): about 92% of the time
2) English(英文): about 5% of the time, and with a moderate to heavy accent
3) Mandarin Chinese(普通话): about 3% of the time

These percentages may change as time goes on, but this doesn't bode well for my Mandarin Chinese (putonghua) studies in Hong Kong.

In my experience, I've noticed that Hong Kong is most similar to Singapore. They both have the British colonial backgrounds and so traces of British influence can be found in both places. English spoken by Hong Kongers sounds something like the pre-cursor to "Singlish", but not having been taken so far and without all the cultural flair.

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