From English in Hong Kong to Hong Kong English: A new diachronic approach to genre and varietal developments in (post)kolonial contexts

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Carolin Biewer
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523188841

In the following proposal, we advocate a systematic diachronic approach to the evolution and dynamics of English in Hong Kong using empirical data from the early days of the colony to today, integrating the impact of socio-political developments in Hong Kong and paying close attention to genre developments in both the parental variety and the emergent variety. Although earlier calls for such studies are still echoed in recent publication, research in world Englishes still focuses mostly on synchronic studies and often relies on present-day British or American English as point of comparison when identifying structural innovations. However, such approaches neglect linguistic changes in the parental variety as well as developments in genre conventions. Since synchronic corpus studies and cross-varietal comparative studies have shown that genre might be a stronger predictor of variation than variety, supposedly variety-specific developments may in fact have their origin in changes in genre conventions. To be able to separate changes in genre conventions from varietal developments, it is necessary to clearly delineate genres and trace their evolution in a specific context. To make comparisons across time and genre possible, our research group has started to compile the Diachronic Corpus of Hong Kong English (DC-HKE) with texts produced in Hong Kong from various genres from the 1930s onwards in periods that are thirty years apart, thus largely matching the design of the LOB-family. Our studies based on parts of this corpus show that delineating different genres and viewing linguistic changes in the context of societal changes and the (re)construction of local identities (shaped by local events) are necessary preconditions to map and explain emergent variety-specific features. In this project, we focus on newspaper writing and business correspondence as the two genres with the longest-standing tradition in Hong Kong, and systematically investigate historically changing conventions in terms of communicative function, composition, and the differentiation of subgenres on a continuum from personalised/private to objective/official. We explicitly record the language used in the phase of exonormative stabilisation, when communication between settlers and the local population was still restricted to certain domains, to describe the genre-specific linguistic patterns that form the basis for any further (independent) developments and nativisation processes within the emergent variety.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Christian Reul; Dr. Ninja Schulz