User:Graphemecluster/Hong Kong English

This page shows Hong Kong English phonology, i.e. phonetic realization of phonemes in English by people who have Hong Kong Cantonese as their mother tongue.

Some contents are removed due to update in 2021.

Structure
A syllable of Hong Kong English is in the form (F)(C)V(C)(F)+Tone where F are any of the fricative.

The first C can be any consonants below while the second C may only be one of or a fricative above.

Tone
This is the main feature of Hong Kong English.

Hong Kong English is a tonal language.

Hong Kong English has two tones (High, Low) phonemically and three tones (High, Low, Extra-low) allophonically.

TBD

Consonants
In word initial, is mostly pronounced, except for a few words like very. In the medial of a word, is mostly pronounced  for high tone and  for low tone (See the tone section above).

Some of the younger generations have developed the phoneme for English, and they are able to pronounce  as.

are elided before unreleased stops, after nasal consonants and diphthongs, and between any two other consonants.

are unaspirated after.

, and  are palatal  for a portion of people.

may be pronounced, and and  may be elided when they act as a part of consonant clusters.

and are mixed for a protion of people.

Possible realizations of consonants
( is glottal and and  are affricate.)

Individual phonemes and their realizations
Some sequences below may not occur in English, e.g. initial and.

Vowels
In the following, is transcribed. The actual pronunciation may be as high as but not as back as.

According to the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, and  are merged to  and  respectively.

may also be pronounced or  for the phoneme  (but not ).

and are not included despite their presence in Cantonese. Note that may be used as an echo-vowel after

Vowels are not necessary lengthened despite the presence of the symbol “”.

and are treated as  and  respectively.

Standard Lexical Sets
The following table shows the pronunciation of each diaphoneme in Hong Kong English.