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Hong Kongers and their languages: bordering, scale and identity

  • Kara Fleming EMAIL logo and Umberto Ansaldo
Published/Copyright: August 6, 2024

Abstract

In this paper, we examine discourses about border and scale in the context of Hong Kong’s relationship with mainland China. We argue that, as the physical and political borders between Hong Kong and the mainland are eroding, other forms of bordering practices – such as linguistic borders – become more salient and contested. We draw on selected thematic analyses of a corpus of 70 articles from Hong Kong English media, as well as socio-historical analyses that have widely circulated since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, in order to examine how the construction of “Cantonese” and “Mandarin” is managed against anxieties about Hong Kong’s potential loss of distinction and fears of becoming “just another Chinese city”. In this process, both borders and scales become key terrains of negotiation and function themselves as ideological resources in debates about Hong Kong’s identity and future, as certain distinctions take on reduced or pronounced meaning from particular scalar perspectives. Amid an ongoing reframing of what it means to be “Chinese”, examining language ideologies in Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of how national and linguistic categories achieve or reframe their social meanings.


Corresponding author: Kara Fleming, Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, KIMEP University, Almaty, Kazakhstan, E-mail:

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Received: 2023-02-09
Accepted: 2024-05-03
Published Online: 2024-08-06
Published in Print: 2024-07-26

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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