Multilingual Mix in Hong Kong Advertising, Pre- and Post-1997

Abstract

The paper examines the historical change in linguistic practice of Hong Kong advertising through the decolonization period and attempts to make sense of it from a local-and-global point of view beyond the conventional national-functionalist perspective. It is found that the prominent patterns of language mixing in the advertising of Hong Kong are not only ‘Standard Written Chinese mixed with English’, but also ‘Standard Written Chinese mixed with both English and Cantonese’. The embedded elements of both English and Cantonese in the Chinese advertisements can take the form of a word, a phrase and/or a full clause and can serve both informational and involving functions. Finally, it is argued that multilingual mix in Hong Kong advertising is a phenomenon constantly emerging in the multicultural process of globalization and that being able to mix different languages or varieties of languages for effective communication should be an aspect of linguistic competence highly valued in the age of globalization and localization.

Keywords:

• Multilingual Mix
• Glocalization
• Hong Kong
• Cultural China

Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by RGC Directly Allocated Research Grant, Hong Kong (#A-PAOG).

Notes

1. ‘Cultural China’ can be defined as a community or a set of communities which share a common written language—Chinese, Chinese ethnicity and lifestyle, lingering and underlying Confucian social norms and a Chinese self-identity (see also Frith & Tsao, 1998 for details).

2. Standard Written Chinese in mainland China uses the simplified Chinese character version, while Hong Kong as well as Taiwan are using the classical/complicated version.

3. The categorization of ‘local products’ or ‘foreign products’ is based on the country of origin or brand of origin for the product, disregarding the country or place where the product is made or manufactured.

4. It should be noted that while SWC and Cantonese can be taken as two languages or two different varieties of the Chinese language family, we are lumping them together in this section as representing Chinese-only ads because we are comparing our results against Ha (1998) who did not differentiate the varieties of Chinese in her discussion of Chinese-only ads.

5. Readers may also wish to note that rather than totally contradicting with Ha's (1998), the findings of this study also show support for Ha's conjecture on the importance of the use of English for foreign products. As shown in Table 2, a higher percentage of ads for the foreign products (than the local products) in 2002 will use English plus SWC.