There will be a meeting of the Language Variation and Change workshop this Friday, April 6 at 3:30 pm in Cobb 119. Please note the unusual location.

Our speaker will be Alan Yu. Please see below for details about his talk.

“Investigating South Asian Cantonese in Hong Kong from a phonological perspective“
Alan Yu (University of Chicago)

More than 6% of the population of Hong Kong are ethnic minorities, speaking a variety of languages. This focus on the South Asian subpopulation in Hong Kong. While Cantonese is the dominant language of Hong Kong, only around 30% of the South Asian inhabitants reported Cantonese as the language of choice. Little is known about the variety of Cantonese spoken by this community of speakers. This talk reports the progress of a joint project that focuses on the phonetics and phonology of Hong Kong South Asian Cantonese. I show that South Asian Cantonese is not monolithic and the variation, particularly the tonal variation, depends on the sociolinguistic background of the speakers.