The Spoken English of Hong Kong: A Study of Co-occurring Segmental Errors

Abstract

There is broad agreement as to many of the segmental features of the Hong Kong accent of English: neutralisation of vowels which contrast in Standard Southern British English or General American, non-release of final stops, simplification of consonant clusters and devoicing of coda consonants. However, while it is apparent that there is no reason why these features should not co-occur within single words, such co-occurrences have not been identified in previous studies, perhaps because treatments of HK pronunciation have generally used lists of words and have thus elicited atypically careful pronunciation. The connected speech data used in the present study indicates that findings from word lists may not apply to more naturalistic speech. In this study, speakers produced many words with more than one segment sounding like another English phoneme, sometimes affecting all the segments of a word. Although overt signs of misunderstanding hardly arose, this indicates merely that the lack of such overt signals is no sign of acceptability. Arguments that Hong Kong English pronunciation should be viewed as 'phonological' in its own right are rejected as inappropriate, both on grounds that this interpretation is not supported by the phonetics of the data, and more conclusively on sociolinguistic grounds.

The Discrimination of English Vowels by Cantonese ESL Learners in Hong Kong: A Test of the Perceptual Assimilation Model

“…Y. H. Chan, 2005C. Y. H. Chan, , 2007Chan & Li, 2000;Hung, 2000Hung, , 2005Lo, 2007;Stibbard, 2004). Both segmental problems (including problems in vowels, in consonants and in consonant clusters) and suprasegmental problems (such as word stress and rhythm) have been documented.…”

“…"De-pending on individual learners, some may use a short vowel for a long one, others a long vowel for a short one; still others may produce a vowel sound which is somewhere in between the long and short vowels when pronouncing either one" (Chan & Li, 2000: pp. 80-81; see also Stibbard, 2004). Other widespread mispronunciation features include the unnecessary lip-rounding in the production of the central vowel /:/ (e.g.…”

Phonological features of Hong Kong English : patterns of variation and effects on local acceptability

“…Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mollin (2006: 199) concludes that according to these criteria nothing that merits a 'variety' label exists in Europe, and that the term 'Euro-English' should be discarded. In Hong Kong this is the general view that has been taken, to differing extents, by Luke and Richards (1982), Li (2000) and Stibbard (2004). Stibbard's study of phonological variation leads him to argue against the existence of Hong Kong English phonology on 'phonological grounds', namely that "the instability of the accent, the repeated co-occurrences of phonemic overlap in the data, and the fact that for the most part the pronunciation is clearly due to transfer from Cantonese, all undermine the attempt to establish a "phonology of Hong Kong English"' (Stibbard 2004: 140).…”

“…A limitation of earlier descriptions (e.g. Hung 2000;Stibbard 2004;Deterding et al 2008) is that they have tended to focus on university students, who are often far from being highly proficient. Also, while providing useful data about phonological features, there is little indication in these studies of how they are actually distributed across the population.…”

“…In terms of phonology, evidence for the stage 3 'nativization' of Hong Kong English is also provided by Hung's (2000) account of a Hong Kong English accent which can be described phonologically and which, contra Stibbard (2004), is not reducible to the phonology of either Cantonese or English (Hung 2000: 354). There are also signs of positive attitudes, as according to Bolton (2000: 277) the local accent is 'beginning to be regarded as a positively evaluated source of identification'.…”