---
title: "Terms of Address in Hong Kong Variety of the English Language"
description: "The paper describes how speakers of Hong Kong English address one another, and treats these forms as a window into local… 30 references."
authors: ["Yuliya V Bekisheva", "Svetlana S Il’ina"]
year: 2018
venue: "Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices 15"
source: "http://journals.rudn.ru/polylinguality/article/viewFile/20239/16473"
doi: "10.22363/2618-897x-2018-15-4-501-517"
licence: "CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bekisheva-2018-terms-address-hong-kong-variety/"
---
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# Terms of Address in Hong Kong Variety of the English Language (Based on Analysis of “A Dictionary of Hong Kong English”)

**Authors:** Yuliya V Bekisheva and Svetlana S Il’ina · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices 15 · **Publisher:** [Peoples' Friendship University of Russia](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/peoples-friendship-university-of-russia/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-897x-2018-15-4-501-517) · [PDF](http://journals.rudn.ru/polylinguality/article/viewFile/20239/16473) · [DOI 10.22363/2618-897x-2018-15-4-501-517](https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-897x-2018-15-4-501-517) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2906185996)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper describes how speakers of Hong Kong English address one another, and treats these forms as a window into local culture within the World Englishes framework. The authors had earlier surveyed Hong Kong residents and sorted address forms into six groups: kin, strangers, friends and acquaintances, professional status, animals, and special or unique forms. Here they take a second source, “A Dictionary of Hong Kong English” (Cummings & Wolf, 2011). They collect the direct and indirect address forms recorded in it and analyse them with observational, descriptive and quantitative methods.

Before the analysis, the paper reviews:
- Kachru’s ideas of nativization and pluricentric English;
- the historical layers of English in Hong Kong;
- its typical sound, grammar and vocabulary traits.

Working from the dictionary, the authors expand the scheme to seven groups. The new ones cover address that marks the addressee’s nationality, insulting address, and traditional Hong Kong forms. They conclude that address in Hong Kong English, heavily shaped by Cantonese, reflects the cultural identity of its speakers.

## Key points
- **Two data sources:** an earlier questionnaire survey of Hong Kong residents (6 groups) and “A Dictionary of Hong Kong English” (Hong Kong University Press, 2011), which yields 7 groups.
- **New categories from the dictionary:** nationality-marking address, insulting (invective) address, and traditional Hong Kong address forms.
- **Historical layers:** the paper sees modern Hong Kong English as the third stage, after a trade pidgin and a colonial English influenced by Indian workers and soldiers.
- **Grammar traits:**
  - missing 3rd-person -s;
  - inconsistent plural -s;
  - unmarked past tense;
  - double comparatives such as *more better*;
  - sentences with no subject or with a repeated subject.
- **Vocabulary traits:**
  - Cantonese loans grouped by theme (dim-sum, taipan, mahjong);
  - hybrid compounds such as *Ching Ming Festival*;
  - local derivations such as *Hongkonger* and *Mainlander*.

## Interesting ideas
- The authors build a category from a survey and then re-check it against a dictionary, and the second source adds classes the first one missed; triangulating sources this way exposes gaps in any single-source taxonomy.
- Kachru’s split between error, deviation and innovation treats a deviation as a variety feature once a whole community uses it systematically, rather than as a mistake.
- Hong Kong English allows both dropped subjects and doubled subjects, where a noun phrase is later resumed by a pronoun such as *they*.
- The paper treats address terms as signals of the speaker’s attitude, the addressee’s status and the relation between them, not merely as attention-getters.
- Hybrid loans pair a Cantonese part with an English head noun that fixes the category, as in *Ching Ming Festival*.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): build lexical inventories (e.g. vocatives) from several independent sources and log which classes each source alone would have missed, as a coverage check.
- **I2** (tokens): the tagger and lemmatizer should accept forms like unmarked plurals or a bare 3rd-person verb as possible variety features, keeping the intended feature instead of forcing a repair.
- **I3** (tree): add such sentences to parser tests so that missing subjects are handled gracefully and resumed subjects are attached in a principled UD way rather than as two nsubj.
- **I4** (frames): when a vocative appears, record the social relation it implies (kin, professional, insult) as an explainable pragmatic fact that can feed into the world of the text.
- **I5** (world): classify unknown multiword names by their English head (festival → event) so that unfamiliar cultural terms still receive an ontology type.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Far Eastern Federal University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/far-eastern-federal-university/) — University, Vladivostok, Russia · 2 works · 6 citations

📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 1,373 works

## Cite

Cite as: Yuliya V Bekisheva and Svetlana S Il’ina. 2018. Terms of Address in Hong Kong Variety of the English Language (Based on Analysis of “A Dictionary of Hong Kong English”). Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices 15.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{bekisheva2018terms,
  title = {{Terms of Address in Hong Kong Variety of the English Language (Based on Analysis of “A Dictionary of Hong Kong English”)}},
  author = {Yuliya V Bekisheva and Svetlana S Il’ina},
  booktitle = {Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices 15},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.22363/2618-897x-2018-15-4-501-517},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-897x-2018-15-4-501-517}
}
```

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- [↑ back to papers of 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2018/page/6/)

## References

30 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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30. Bekisheva, Y.V., and S.S. Il’ina. 2017. “Obrashcheniya v gonkongskom variante angliiskogo yazyka (na material provedennykh oprosov zhitelei Gonkonga)” [Terms of Address in Hong Kong Variant of the English Language (based on the interviewing of Hong Kong citizens] in Problemy, perspektivy I napravleniya innovatsionnogo razvitiya nauki Proceedings. 08 July, Perm’. Ufa: Omega-Sains Publ. Print. (In Russ). Article history: Received: 26.04.2018 Accepted: 26.09.2018 Moderator: U.M. Bakhtikireeva Conflict of interests: none For citation: Bekisheva, Y.V., and S.S. Il’ina. 2018. “[Terms of Address in Hong Kong Variety of the English Language (Based on Analysis of “A Dictionary of Hong Kong English”)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bekisheva-2018-terms-address-hong-kong-variety/)”. Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices, 15 (4), 501—517. DOI 10.22363/2618-897X-2018-15-4-501-517 Bekisheva Y.V., Il’ina S.S. Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices, 2018, 15 (4), 501—517 Bio Notes: Yuliya V. Bekisheva is an Assistant of the Academic Department of English at the Eastern Institute — School of Regional and International Studies. E-mail: julia.bekisheva@gmail.com Svetlana S. Il’ina is a PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of the Academic Department of English at the Eastern Institute — School of Regional and International Studies. E-mail: svilyina@ mail.ru [↗](https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-897x-2018-15-4-501-517)

*Updated 24 October 2026*