The decline and fall of English in Hong Kong's Legislative Council

This article presents the findings of a corpus-based study of the use of English vis-à-vis Cantonese and Putonghua in Hong Kong's Legislative Council in the past four decades. The objective of the study was to track the changing fortunes of the three languages in a key government institution during a period of unprecedented political, economic and social change. This was accomplished by analysing a 91-million-word corpus of Council proceedings derived from Hong Kong Hansard, which is the verbatim record of Council meetings. For the greater part of the colonial era (1842–1997), English was the sole medium of communication in the chamber. It was only in 1972 that Cantonese-speaking members were permitted to use the city's majority language in Council debates. In that year every speech was in English. Forty years later, only 0.38% of the addresses were in the colonial language, the overwhelming majority being in Cantonese (99.45%), with only a handful in Putonghua. This article describes and discusses the rise of Cantonese and the concomitant demise of English since the early 1970s, with a particular focus on the transitional 1990s, and speculates on the roles of Cantonese and Putonghua in the legislature in the years ahead.