From practice to convention: how Kongish is creatively written by Hong Kong Cantonese-English bilinguals

On a Hong Kong online Cantonese discussion forum, one of the replies “Ho ho j ah[1]” is written differently than most other replies. Although the sentence is written with the use of English alphabet, it is syntactically... [ view full abstract ]

On a Hong Kong online Cantonese discussion forum, one of the replies “Ho ho j ah[1]” is written differently than most other replies. Although the sentence is written with the use of English alphabet, it is syntactically closer to a Cantonese sentence. If it is translated into English, it can mean “really good for wanking”. This is an interesting example because it deviates from the norms of Standard Chinese writing: It uses a foreign orthography but its Chinese Characters; It follows an English grapheme-phoneme conversion scheme in transcribing the Cantonese sound; Most interestingly, it uses the English word/letter “j” which is not a loanword because it has no meaning related to “wanking” in English. It is not an existing Cantonese word because it is pronounced with a non-Cantonese rime. A question may be posed in here: if “j” is neither a meaningful English word nor an existing Cantonese word, then what is it? Hong Kong people call this writing practice as “Kongish”, and this paper is going to discuss its orthographic conventions, and how Cantonese and English have contributed to the birth of this practice.

Kongish was coined in 2015 because of the establishment of an online Facebook fan-page - Kongish Daily, a parody of mainstream news media rewriting articles from a sarcastic perspective. It refers to a writing practice which Cantonese-English bilinguals mix English and Cantonese under the usage of the English alphabet. While many Hongkongers believe the famous Kongish example “What 7 you say?” is a new internet slang, it was one of the well-known Kongish phrases that can be traced back in 1998 from the Hong Kong movie: Portland Street Blues. However, this distinctive variety has rarely been observed in most spoken contexts unlike in the movie. While its usage has been quite restricted in spoken contexts, it has been quite vital in written computer-mediated communication. With the popularity of Kongish Daily, a 200,000-words Kongish corpus collecting readers' responses from the page is constructed to study the patterns of these spelling variations. The convolution of written Kongish makes this an interesting topic to study its orthographic conventions.