Many casual observers outside Asia believe that everyone in Hong Kong, owing to its British colonial past, speaks English as fluently as the queen (or, at least, George Bush). Others, hearing the grunts of martial artists like Jackie Chan, might think that English is truly a foreign entity to the people of Hong Kong, as unknown to them as, say, pizza or hamburgers. Both assumptions, as Kingsley Bolton shows in this fascinating new collection of essays, are quite wrong. Instead, the place of English in Hong Kong is probably unique in the world: It is neither simply a variety poorly mimicking the language of the UK, nor an imperial tongue imposed on a subservient populace. It is these dynamics of culture, identity, economics, globalization, education – and, indeed, politics – that are addressed in this stimulating book.

Bolton, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, is a widely known authority on the history and sociolinguistics of English in China and Hong Kong (e.g., Bolton 2003). Most of the articles in this volume first appeared in a special issue, which he also edited, on Hong Kong English in the journal World Englishes at the end of 2000. For this book, Bolton has written a new 25-page introduction describing how the autonomy and creativity of Hong Kong English has remained intact even since reunification with the mainland in 1997, and setting the stage for the arguments presented in the subsequent chapters.

Bolton divides the 16 remaining chapters into five thematic sections. Part I, “Language in context,” discusses the English-language media in Hong Kong (Chan Yuen-ying), Cantonese-English code-switching (David C. S. Li), English-language teachers' attitudes (Amy B. M. Tsui & David Bunton), and the historical sociolinguistics of English in the region (Bolton).

Part II focuses on the formal aspects of Hong Kong English. Tony T. N. Hung describes its phonology, Nikolas Gisborne examines relative clauses, and Phil Benson discusses the lexicon. In Part III, “Dimensions of creativity,” we find three poets (Louise Ho, Agnes Lam, and Leung Ping-kwan), a novelist (Xu Xi), and a newspaper satirist (Nury Vittachi) focusing on literary production and the use of Hong Kong English.

“Resources” for further research on Hong Kong English are presented in Part IV. Bolton gives an extensive annotated bibliography of about 150 academic sources in one of his contributions in this section. Shirley Geok-lin Lim shows how the use of Hong Kong English can be a tool for educators to foster the “cultural imagination” of Hong Kong students. And Bolton and Gerald Nelson show the potential research applications of corpus linguistics in analyzing Hong Kong English. (These last two chapters were not included in the original World Englishes special issue, and they make a nice addition, complementing the other articles in the book.)

Finally, in Part V, “Future directions,” Bolton and Lim review the various linguistic and literary issues that have been brought up in the previous chapters, and offer suggestions as to how a careful reexamination of Hong Kong English could not only contribute to improved English-language instruction but could also help to solidify the region's identity vis-à-vis mainland China and the international community.

I believe that this book would be of scholarly interest to many linguists, sociologists, and anthropologists. The articles are also lively enough – containing the right mixture of theory, data, and colorful anecdotes – to hold the attention of even casual undergraduate students. Where else would one learn, for example, that when Wong Wing-fai was “chopped to death” (p. 209) – as described in Hong Kong English – he was really just stabbed? But, more importantly, these articles tackle crucial theoretical issues of concern to all who study the use of language in daily practice, regardless of geographical area. For example, we see that code-mixing or code-switching between English and Cantonese occurs in parallel to the localized usages of Hong Kong English, giving new resources to everyday users and creative writers.

One of the most important reasons why this book is significant, however – and a reason why it will appeal to sociolinguists of many different persuasions – is that it is an illustrative Asian case study of the claims that many in the “world Englishes” movement have been making over the past decade. In particular, these theorists have been arguing that international varieties of English now have autonomy and are no longer linguistically or culturally dependent on the norms or authority of British or American native speakers (Kachru 1997b). Braj Kachru, probably the foremost scholar in this field, makes a strong argument that English is now an Asian language as much as a North American or European one. For example, consider these facts (Kachru 1996, 1997a). At least one in every ten Asians uses English every day in some form for either work or recreation. The third largest English-using country is India, second only to the United States and the United Kingdom. In close to half of the countries in Asia, English is a de jure official, auxiliary, or second language. In some parts of Asia, such as Singapore, English is acquiring de facto status as the dominant or first language.

In many places in Asia – India, the Philippines, and Singapore, for example – there has developed a consciousness of the local varieties of English, and indeed pride in them. At the same time, these places have also become sites of creative vitality, often with extensive literatures in the local English variety. Until recently, however, Hong Kong residents were unaware of a Hong Kong variety of English, or else they dismissed it as merely a bad or inadequate version of “real” English. Sometimes these attitudes were fostered by well-meaning but linguistically naïve English teachers of native origin who, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, tried to improve perceived falling academic standards.

However, there is now no doubt of the growing importance of English in all aspects of life in Hong Kong. In 1961 less than 10% of the population had good knowledge of English. This grew to a quarter of the population in 1971, and to almost a third by 1991. This number climbed to 43% in 2001 (34). No doubt the eight universities in Hong Kong that use English as the primary medium of instruction are also a contributing factor.

Oddly, the prominence of English increased as steps toward reunification with the mainland took place. This is one of the more intriguing developments in the story of Hong Kong English. Before the People's Republic of China established the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region under its “one country, two systems” policy in 1997, the Hong Kong government announced that it would develop a civil service that was “biliterate in English and Chinese, and trilingual in English, Cantonese, and Putonghua” (35). The interplay among three languages and two orthographies has made Hong Kong a fascinating linguistics laboratory. The handover, of course, has seen a marked increase in the use of Putonghua ‘common speech’, the official prescribed language of China. This language is often referred to as Mandarin, or simply “Chinese,” in the West, and is called Guoyu ‘national language’ in Taiwan. Regardless of nomenclature, Putonghua is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese, the local language of most Hong Kong residents. As a noted Sinologist has pointed out, “As far as the magnitude or difficulty of the learning problem is concerned, there is not much difference between a Cantonese learning Putonghua and a Hispanic learning English” (DeFrancis 1984:230). The tension between these languages can be seen in various institutional and informal arenas; for example, a Chinese saying claims, “We do not fear the sky or the earth. What we fear is hearing a Cantonese speaking Mandarin” (Chang & Chang 1978:10).

Ironically, it was the presence of English in the territory that allowed Cantonese to elaborate its functions in ways that were denied other “dialects” (2). Official policy in China since 1949 was to promote the Putonghua national language at the expense of local languages in schools and the media. (And since the mid-1950s, this language was written exclusively in simplified Chinese characters.) But because Putonghua is competing in Hong Kong with another official language, English, Cantonese can take on numerous other roles, such as that of a lingua franca among new immigrants (79). As a result, however, among academics, intellectuals, and the media there has developed a belief in a monocultural Hong Kong Cantonese ethnic identity. It appears irrelevant that this ideology is at odds with both historical fact and contemporary demographics. What this means for the future of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region remains to be seen; what is certain, however, is that English will be inexorably involved in whatever happens.