Word-formation in Hong Kong English: diachronic and synchronic perspectives

Abstract

The publication of the first dictionary of Hong Kong English (HKE) marks a major milestone in the legitimisation of HKE as an autonomous variety of English. This article examines the emergence and current prevalence of the vocabulary of HKE using five recently compiled corpora of English in Hong Kong. The diachronic perspective is provided by a 91-million-word corpus of Legislative Council proceedings (1858–2012) and a collection of 1379 letters published in the city’s leading English-language newspapers (1842–2010). The synchronic perspective is derived from a three-million-word corpus of lifestyle-magazine articles (2005–2012), a database containing 2820 letters published in the South China Morning Post in 2012 and the well-known Corpus of Global Web-based English. These corpora are used to assess the representativeness of the HKE lexicon compiled by the authors of the dictionary, to identify the principal processes of word-formation and to determine phases in the evolution of the HKE vocabulary.