03078nas a2200277   4500000000100000000000100001000000100002008004100003653002300044653002700067653002400094653002100118653002200139653001900161653002200180653002600202653001400228653002200242100001500264245007600279856014900355300001200504490000600516520225800522022002002780       2016                            d10aCantonese language10aCantonese lexicography10aColloquial register10aEnglish loanword10aHong Kong Chinese10aMorphosyllable10aPhonetic features10aPluricentric language10aPutonghua10aStandard language1 aR.S. Bauer00aThe Hong Kong Cantonese language: Current features and future prospects  uhttps://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85046757547&doi=10.1515%2fglochi-2016-0007&partnerID=40&md5=7fd1193c30d2a19ffdc2085fbfccdac6  a115-1610 v23 aAs the contemporary Chinese language has evolved into various distinguishable varieties across East and Southeast Asian speech communities, the term pluricentric (i. e. having multiple centers or standards) has appropriately been applied to it. Because the development of the Chinese variety as spoken and written in Hong Kong has been profoundly influenced by a unique congeries of social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, historical, and linguistic factors intrinsically linked to Hong Kong, it systematically differs from those varieties used in mainland China and on Taiwan. Hong Kong’s predominant, most widely-used speech variety is Cantonese: this is to say that 90 \% of the ethnic Chinese population of about 6.5 million speak it as their usual, daily language. The Hong Kong Cantonese language has acquired an extraordinary status due to its distinctive vocabulary and indigenous Chinese characters, identifiably colloquial phonetic features, highly conventionalized written form, large inventory of English loanwords borrowed through phonetic transliteration, and tradition of lexicography combined with romanization. Although Cantonese predominates in Hong Kong, however, at the same time, a worrying trend is the increasing number of schools switching their medium of instruction from Cantonese to Putonghua, just one noticeable difference between now and 1997 when Hong Kong, a British Crown Colony since 1841, was returned to China’s sovereignty as a Special Administrative Region. The Hong Kong speech community’s attitudes toward Cantonese are contradictory: some people denigrate it as “a coarse, vulgar relic of China’s feudal past” that should be replaced by Putonghua, the national language, while others praise it for preserving ancient rimes and extol it for expressing social, political, and cultural differences that set Hong Kong apart from mainland China. That Cantonese continues to decline in Guangzhou may be a harbinger of things to come in Hong Kong. Ironically, the Hong Kong government’s recognition of the Cantonese language as intangible cultural heritage which would seem to be a good status for it to have, on the contrary, has made some people fear it could become extinct in the future.  a21994374 (ISSN)