Hong Kong Cantonese in Cantopop from phonological and lexical perspectives

Abstract

Cantopop, being a pivotal part of Hong Kong’s entertainment business, is highly influential to Hong Kong’s identity and culture. The songs display the features of linguistic hybridity in a number of ways. First and foremost is combination of two forms of Chinese. While the songs are primarily written in Standard Chinese, they are sung in Cantonese, the lingua franca in Hong Kong. Second, code-mixing and loanwords as a result of language contact between English and Cantonese are techniques that have been frequently employed since the birth of Cantopop. Given the important status of English as an international language and also one of the two official languages in Hong Kong, English is the most frequently used language in Cantopop for code-mixing. Third, Hong Kong’s distinctive disglossia situation facilitates the combination of Standard Chinese, the high language, and vernacular Cantonese, the low language in Cantopop. This paper has investigated popular Hong Kong Cantonese songs both phonologically and lexically. In terms of phonological perspective, the issue of phonological variation, also termed as “lazy pronunciation”, was explored both diachronically, through the universe of popular songs, and synchronically, through an online survey to investigate people’s level of awareness of different types of sound change. This paper would only study phonological variation in the position of syllable-initial consonant. For lexical perspectives, this paper has examined the phenomena of code-mixing and loanwords from the same corpus of songs. Code-mixing and loanwords are often found in Cantopop to enhance the creativity of the songs. This paper has endeavoured to identify the characteristics, trend and motives of code-mixing and loanwords in Cantopop.