Bilingual language play and local creativity in Hong Kong

Abstract

As a cosmopolitan city in Asia, Hong Kong has since the colonial days adopted a bilingual policy in education and public administration. The use of bilingual texts, however, has mainly been confined to information transmission at public level. The present paper explores the increasing use of bilingual texts at societal level for playful and publicity functions. Through several examples of bilingual texts showing linguistic creativity collected from the mass media in Hong Kong, I analyze the formal properties of the bilingual language play, their sociocultural meanings, and how the texts were used in the particular context of Hong Kong. The analysis reveals three distinct strategies of bilingual language play, namely phonological/ morphological cross-over, semantic parallelism/complementation, and language-spatial arrangements. Apart from displaying features of commercial use of language play to attract attention, some of the examples reveal the desire to mock government policies, and achieve nonsensical mental pleasure. These examples of bilingual language play provide evidence of local creative use of bilingual resources. As part of the ‘metrolinguistic’ landscape, these bilingual language texts constitute sophisticated authentic use of bilingual resources and call for language teachers’ consideration as to how such resources could be most optimally utilized and capitalized on to promote a motivated use of bilingualism.