Hong Kong’s Handover from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 could have brought about rapid and momentous changes to Hong Kong’s language regime. Change, however, has for the most part been incremental, and much of the British-era’s language regime remains largely intact today, including the salience of English in many domains. At the same time, language policy changes did occur, mainly through the educational policy of biliteracy and trilingualism, which added Mandarin to the de facto English-Cantonese bilingual regime. However, nearly half-way through the transition period, Mandarin use has made few notable inroads in Hong Kong society, though there are signs that this may be about to change - perhaps drastically so. This paper analyzes the evolution of Hong Kong’s language regime from its unique perspective as a city connected to the global community like few others, and located between two state traditions - one marked by pluralist, laissez-faire capitalism, and the other by Communism and totalitarian state nationalism. Overall, this case study of Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of colonial legacies, competing mobilizations, incremental change, and multilevel governance as it helps to expand the STLR framework.

Reflecting the cultural and regional diversity in China, signs may contain dialectal elements, especially those of the major dialects such as Cantonese, Min, and Shanghai/Wu. Dialects can differ in vocabulary and grammar, and particularly in sound. The differences in sound can sometimes be seen in phonetic transliterations. Dialectal words are those that do not have counterparts in the standard language. They are often written by borrowing standard characters just for the sound without regard for their original meaning (Rebus Principle); they can also be written in specially created dialectal characters. Dialects can also resemble classical Chinese, as they tend to retain features of older Chinese.

This chapter examines how the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ are realized in two varieties of Chinese Korean: Hunchun and Dandong. In Seoul Korean, these vowels have mostly diphthongized, but variation is reported in other dialects. In a large-scale study including acoustic measurements from the two aforementioned heritage varieties, two homeland varieties (i.e., Seoul and Northern Hamgyeong), and local Mandarin varieties, as well as self-reports of language background, we examine the potential influence of ancestral dialect, prestige dialect, and contact language on the realization of heritage varieties. Results show more monophthongal realizations of the vowels in question in Dandong, Hunchun, and Northern Hamgyeong Korean than in Seoul Korean. We also find that Dandong speakers show less diphthongization of /y/ than Hunchun speakers, whereas the two groups do not differ in the production of /ø/. We attribute this difference to influence from Mandarin, which has a more dominant community-level presence in Dandong than in Hunchun.

This study investigates the effect of changes in voice onset time (VOT) on heritage speakers’ perception of Korean intervocalic stops (i.e., /p, t, k/), and compares their results to those of Korean monolinguals and second language (L2) learners of Korean who are L1 speakers of American English or Mandarin Chinese. A discrimination task using five synthetic /C1V1C2V2/ stimuli that differed in VOT of C2 was created to test inter-group differences. While the L2 learners display categorical awareness of VOT variation, Korean and heritage speakers perceive the two consonants to be the same for most stimuli regardless of VOT values. This unexpected lack of attention to VOT variation among heritage speakers suggests that they may switch their language mode to Korean and activate Korean phonology in discriminating non-phonemic VOT differences. However, their responses are not uniform or robust, with some showing a pattern similar to that of L2 learners, revealing strong individual differences among heritage speakers.

This chapter takes an individual-differences perspective on the dual sound systems of American heritage speakers (HSs) of Mandarin Chinese. Based on detailed socio-demographic data and production data on segmentals and suprasegmentals, we build holistic demographic and phonetic profiles for HSs, as well as native speakers and late learners, to explore how different aspects of their two languages (i.e., Mandarin, English) may develop in relation to each other and how individual variation in production may be related to socio-demographic factors. Using multiple factor analysis (MFA), we describe the range of these profiles, identify clusters of variation defined by different socio-demographic factors, and argue that some factors (e.g., age of arrival, language(s) spoken at home) have more predictive power for phonetic profiles than others. Overall, our results suggest a significant, if limited, link between socio-demographic factors and production, but only in Mandarin. We conclude by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of group-based and individual-centered approaches.

This article compares the presence of some functional categories which are at play in English or in French to their absence in Mandarin. It shows that rather than being ‘absent’ these categories are inactive, due to the analyticity of the language. For instance, Mandarin ‘lacks’ (i) subject–verb agreement, (ii) plural markers on nouns, (iii) a complementizer as a head of a clause in subject or in object position, and (iv) verb gapping.

This chapter discusses the changing local and global contexts in which Chinese (i.e., one or more Chinese languages or dialects) is being learned by multilingual youth and adults. Case studies of heritage- and non-heritage transnational learners of Mandarin in Canada, the United States, Australia and China illustrate the multi-scalar influences and enactments of larger geopolitical initiatives, ideologies, investments, and power relations in Chinese education and the many forms of Chinese-involved multilingualism(s) that can result. The chapter then explores how these and other factors shape learners’ identities, forms of agency, and linguistic histories as well as their trajectories and (sometimes fraught) subjectivities as multilingual Sinophones. The chapter concludes with a call for additional research representing a wider range of multilingualisms, raciolinguistic identities (especially among non-Anglophone learners), and migration histories and trajectories in Chinese language learning.

Object mass nouns, such as furniture, are mass, but they allow quantity evaluations and comparisons in terms of a cardinal scale. This paper addresses the vexing question of how such cardinal comparisons are possible for object mass nouns, given that, as mass nouns, these expressions are not countable. Building upon her theory of count nouns based on semantic atomicity (entities that are indexed to counting contexts), and on her work on the distinction between counting and measuring and the semantics of measure functions, Rothstein proposes a treatment of quantity evaluations for object mass nouns based on measure comparisons using values on a cardinality scale which, unlike counting does not require access to a set of semantic atoms. Rothstein then extends this analysis and argues that two types of estimation operations have grammatical properties associated with measuring: Russian approximative inversion, and cardinality estimation in Mandarin.

This chapter analyses the connections between quantity expressions, which, in English, include expressions such as three, several, a few, much, and many, and the mass/count distinction. Based on cross-linguistic evidence from Brazilian Portuguese, English, Mandarin, and Yudja, amongst others, Doetjes argues that quantity expressions can be exhaustively subdivided into two classes: count quantity expressions, which presuppose the availability of units that can be counted, and non-count quantity expressions, which do not presuppose the availability of units that can be counted. Anti-count quantity expressions, which presuppose the absence of units that can be counted, are subsumed under the class of non-count quantity expressions. On the basis of this distinction, Doetjes argues that while we may expect to find languages in which all nouns have a count denotation (Yudja being a good candidate), it is not predicted to be possible for there to be languages in which all nouns have a mass denotation.

This chapter provides a description of the basic interpersonal clause system in Khorchin Mongolian – i.e., MOOD. The categories in the traditional description of Khorchin Mongolian clause grammar are mostly defined notionally and are not grammatically motivated. In contrast, the description in this chapter motivates the clause classes in the MOOD system in terms of their structural configurations based on unmonitored conversational data. The functions of Predicator, Positioner, Interrogator and Inquirer are used to distinguish the general types of [indicative] and [imperative] and the more delicate systems they make available. The MOOD systems are then characterised in relation to their functions in exchanges in terms of the structural configurations that realise options in NEGOTIATION in discourse semantics. The description in this chapter makes significant contributions to (i) the unified description of Khorchin Mongolian clause types and structures, and (ii) the characterisation of grammatical patterns in terms of discourse semantics.