Bilingual language play and local creativity in Hong Kong

Abstract

As a former colony of Britain and now a cosmopolitan city in Asia under the sovereignty of China, Hong Kong has adopted a bilingual policy in education and public administration, with English and Chinese as the two official languages. Much previous research has focused on verbal bilingual practices for social and educational communication. The present paper, however, explores the increasing use of visual bilingual texts at the societal level for playful effects. Ten examples of bilingual texts showing linguistic creativity were collected through incidental sampling mostly from the linguistic landscape and mediascape in Hong Kong and analysed for their textual properties, semantic features and socio-pragmatic use. The analysis revealed three distinct strategies of bilingual language play: phonological/lexical crossover, semantic enhancement and visual parody. Apart from displaying features of the commercial use of language play to enhance memorability, some of the examples revealed a desire to mock government policies or to achieve mental pleasure of a nonsensical nature. These examples of bilingual language play provide evidences of local creative and motivated use of bilingual resources to achieve a double-voiced social discourse.