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Chiu-Chow-Cantonese Code-Switching Within a Hnog Kong Domestic Discourse

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Chiu-Chow-Cantonese Code-Switching Within a Hnog Kong Domestic Discourse
1. INTRODUCTION As learning an additional language is regarded as being competitive and advantageous, there are more and more bilinguals and multilinguals in many places worldwide, and Hong Kong is one of these places. With a majority of the population being able to master a number of languages, code-switching, which is the alternate use of (more than) two languages by a bilingual (or multilingual) within a discourse, is undoubtedly a common and frequently occurring linguistic phenomenon in Hong Kong.
1.1 Significance of the case study Much previous research on code-switching in Hong Kong has focused on the two major and official languages – English and Cantonese. Code-switching studies were almost always about these two distinct languages that are most often heard in the community. However, people have seldom looked into other dialects of Chinese. A lot of dialects actually exist and are used frequently among the domestic household and local neighbourhood, and it would be a very new point of view to look into the reality of code-switching in one of the minority languages in Hong Kong. As more and more mainlander immigrants come to Hong Kong from all over China, it is inevitable that dialects from different regions will be heard for a period of time, and dialect code-switching is likely to become more and more common in the future. Hence, this case study is an update of today’s dialect code-switching in a Hong Kong’s domestic discourse.
1.2 Aims and Objectives The general aim of this case study is to investigate the characteristics of code-switching between two Chiu-Chow-Cantonese[1] bilinguals in a discourse from a sociolinguistic dimension which focuses on the social motivations for switching. Specifically speaking, these characteristics refer to:
- where they code-switch (where it occurs in a sentence),
- how frequently they code-switch (how many turns on average) and
- why they code-switch (the function of code-switching). At
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