Intonation in Hong Kong English and Guangzhou Cantonese-Accented English: a Phonetic Comparison
ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 11, No. 5, pp. 724-738, September 2020 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1105.07 Intonation in Hong Kong English and Guangzhou Cantonese-accented English: A Phonetic Comparison Yunyun Ran School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, 333 Long Teng Road, Shanghai 201620, China Jeroen van de Weijer School of Foreign Languages, Shenzhen University, 3688 Nan Hai Avenue, Shenzhen 518060, China Marjoleine Sloos Fryske Akademy (KNAW), Doelestrjitte 8, 8911 DX Leeuwarden, The Netherlands Abstract—Hong Kong English is to a certain extent a standardized English variety spoken in a bilingual (English-Cantonese) context. In this article we compare this (native) variety with English as a foreign language spoken by other Cantonese speakers, viz. learners of English in Guangzhou (mainland China). We examine whether the notion of standardization is relevant for intonation in this case and thus whether Hong Kong English is different from Cantonese English in a wider perspective, or whether it is justified to treat Hong Kong English and Cantonese English as the same variety (as far as intonation is concerned). We present a comparison between intonational contours of different sentence types in the two varieties, and show that they are very similar. This shows that, in this respect, a learned foreign-language variety can resemble a native variety to a great extent. Index Terms—Hong Kong English, Cantonese-accented English, intonation I. INTRODUCTION Cantonese English may either refer to Hong Kong English (HKE), or to a broader variety of English spoken in the Cantonese-speaking area, including Guangzhou (Wong et al.
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