How to speak English with a Hong Kong accent — by Dr. Toni Lam, Division of Arts and Languages

Keywords: Hong Kong English, world Englishes, phonetics and phonology, tone and intonation, language and identity

Accepted: May 28, 2025; Published online: June 6, 2025; Published: June 27, 2025

Being an Asia’s world city, Hong Kong boasts its diverse demographics, including its international workforce and student population. Many non-Chinese residents might like to learn the local language, Hong Kong Cantonese, but are daunted and deterred, at least partly, by its non-romanised script. A more English-speaker-friendly and accessible alternative is perhaps its close cousin – Hong Kong English (HKE hereafter).

Owing to its mixed linguistic background, HKE has been influenced by both its substrate tone language (Hong Kong Cantonese) and donor native varieties of English (e.g. British English and/or American English), resulting in its rather unique and distinct phonological features, with “very identifiable local flavours” (Wee, 2019, p. 228), both segmental and suprasegmetal. The HKE accent can be used to perform various sociolinguistic functions, including but not limited to signalling their Hong Kong identity, stressing localism, colloquialism, closeness, informality, lightheartedness, sarcasm, camaraderie, and community membership (Lam, 2017).

Tone category	Tone type	Tone contour	Example
1	Level tone	High level (H)	詩
3	Level tone	Mid level (M)	試
6	Level tone	Low level (LL)	事
2	Rising tone	High rising (MH)	史
5	Rising tone	Low rising (LM)	市
4	Falling/Level tone	Low falling/very low level (L)	時

Wong, Chan, and Beckman (2005) provided a transcription of Cantonese lexical tones, as shown in Table 1. There are altogether six phonemic tones in Hong Kong Cantonese today, which are traditionally described in Yuan-ren Chao’s system of tone numbers, ranging from 1 and 2 for the high pitches of the local pitch range to 4, 5 and 6 for the low pitches. The six tones include three level tones (high, mid, low), two rising tones (high rising and low rising), and one falling tone (low falling), which is sometimes analysed as a very low level tone (e.g. Wee, 2016). Only a subset of these, however, are used in HKE, namely, High, Mid and Low (Gussenhoven, 2017).

Stress patterns of traditional varieties of English, including primary-stressed, secondary-stressed, and unstressed syllables, are re-interpreted as the three Cantonese lexical tone patterns following a set of tone assignment rules, which only distinguish two levels of stress: stressed and unstressed, subsuming primary-stressed and secondary-stressed syllables under the general heading of stressed syllables. Stressed syllables are given the H tone while unstressed syllables are assigned either the M or the L tone. Depending on its position relative to the primary stress, it is possible to predict whether an L or M tone is assigned. The M tone is assigned to unstressed syllables on the left of the stressed syllable, whereas the L tone on the right, yielding a basic template for HKE word prosody: MHL, as in Table 2, for instance,

a-	ma-	zing
M	H	L

the	ma-	na-	ger
M	H	L	L

Note that the H tone is assigned to the primary-stressed syllable, ma,of the word amazing, and flanked by the preceding unstressed syllable a on the left is assigned the M tone and the trailing unstressed syllables on the right is given the L tone. Apart from the location relative to the position of the nuclear stress, a distinction is also made between content words (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives) and form (or function) words (e.g. articles, auxiliaries, prepositions) in the case of monosyllabic words. Content words are generally assigned the H tone whereas form words the M tone. An exception is the case of pronouns, which are usually assigned the H tone, but can acquire the M tone pre-verbally and the L tone post-verbally, still conforming to the MHL template. In general, tone assignment of monosyllabic words is sensitive to grammatical categories, for instance, the definite article the in Table 3 is assigned an M tone, which also happens to be on the left of the stressed syllable. The lexical tone patterns of HKE are, thus, said to be systematically translated from the pitch contours in the citation pronunciations of British and/or American English, which will in turn be stored as phonological representations of the members of the new speech community (Luke, 2000, 2008; Chen & Au, 2004; Wee, 2008; Lim, 2009).

Luke (2000) treated the sentence phonology, or intonation, of HKE as being comprised of the tone patterns of the individual words. The same tone assignment rules for HKE word prosody are assigned to each component word of a sentence or a phrase, following the MHL template for each word as previously introduced. This, however, is not enough. An extra “intersyllabic rule” (Luke, 2000, p.5) is required to modify the tones of intervening syllables between stressed syllables by changing any L tone between two H tones or between a H tone and a M tone into a H tone, yielding an overall MHL template for the entire sentence. For instance, the last two syllables of “manager” receive L tones in Table 3 but are both raised to H tones in Table 4 since they are now wedged between two H tones (of “ma” and “this”). HKE intonation is thus formed by assigning a sequence of Cantonese lexical tones to represent the most common pitch contours of the English syllables for word stress (Luke, 2000) to yield the basic template of MHL, and by applying a computation for compound words, linking words, phrases and sentences, i.e. the intersyllabic rule, to give a “choppy”, as opposed to smooth, intonation contour for HKE (Luke, 2008), for instance, I saw the manager this morning would have roughly the pattern of MHMHHHHHL!, as in Table 4,

I	saw	the	ma-	na-	ger	this	mor-	ning
M	H	M	H	H	H	H	H	L

An important point to note here is that a distinct characteristic of HKE intonation is the fact that every single syllable in an utterance receives a pitch accent, borrowed from three of the six Cantonese tones, i.e. H, M, and L (Very Low or Low Falling). To contrast that with a “native” pattern of the exact same utterance, as shown in Table 5, only one syllable receives a pitch accent in this case.

I	saw	the	ma-	na-	ger	this	mor-	ning
							H

To sum up, HKE intonation can be achieved by adopting these rules, as adapted from Gussenhoven (2017, p. 593):

1. Assign H to the accented (or stressed) syllables of lexical words.
2. Assign H to the accented syllables of function words.
3. Spread H right within each of the words.
4. Assign M to any left-over syllables.
5. Insert L after last H in the sentence

By following these rules, everybody can then speak English with a local HKE accent.

References

Chen, C. C. Jr., & Au. C.-P. (2004). Tone assignment in second language prosodic learning. Paper presented at Speech Prosody 2004. Nara, Japan. http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/sp2004/sp04_091.html

Gussenhoven, C. (2012, May 26-29). Tone and intonation in Cantonese English. Paper presented at The Third International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages, Nanjing, China.

Gussenhoven, C. (2017). On the intonation of tonal varieties of English. In M. Filupula, J. Klemola & D. Sharma (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes (pp.569-598). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199777716.013.29

Lam, T. (2017). Intonational variation in Hong Kong English: a pilot study. Asian Englishes, 19(1), 22-43.

Lim, L. (2009). Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone language? In L. Lim & N. Gisborne (Eds.), English World-Wide: The Typology of Asian Englishes (Special Issue), 30(2), 218-239.

Luke, K. K. (2000, June). Phonological re-interpretation: The Assignment of Cantonese tones to English words. Paper presented at The 9^thInternational Conference on Chinese Linguistics, Singapore.

Luke, K. K. (2008). Stress and intonation in Hong Kong English. Paper presented at The 14^th Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE), Hong Kong SAR.

Wee, L.-H. (2008). Phonological patterns in the Englishes of Singapore and Hong Kong. World Englishes, 27(3/4), 480-501.

Wee, L.-H. (2016). Tone assignment in Hong Kong English. Language, 92(2), e112-132.

Wee, L.-H. (2019). Phonological tone. Cambridge University Press.

Wong, W. Y. P., Chan, M. K. M, & Beckman, M. E. (2005). An autosegmental-metrical analysis and prosodic annotation conventions for Cantonese. In S.-A. Jun (Ed.), Prosodic typology – The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing (pp.271-300). Oxford University Press.