[lg policy] bibitem: LANGUAGE POLICY, 'ASIA'S WORLD CITY' AND ANGLOPHONE HONG KONG WRITING

[Harold Schiffman]

LANGUAGE POLICY, 'ASIA'S WORLD CITY' AND ANGLOPHONE HONG KONG WRITING
Author: Elaine Yee Lin Hoa

Abstract
Hong Kong's official language policy of 'biliteracy' (Chinese and
English) and 'trilingualism' (Cantonese, Putonghua, English),
announced after the reversion to China in 1997, claims to address
actualities of language use in the territory, remove inequities
between English and Chinese, and consolidate the linguistic platform
to launch Hong Kong as 'Asia's World City'. Public discussion of and
controversy over this policy immediately followed, and have continued
in the past decade. But they have tended to focus on the
implementation of the policy in education, specifically the medium of
instruction in schools, to the exclusion of most other areas of
language use. Drawing on recent examples of translingual practice in
literary writing, this essay argues first that such actually existing
practices are far more verbally nuanced, self-knowing and
self-reflexive than the official policy would allow, and second, that
they instantiate Hong Kong's identity as 'Asian', which challenges
both the official and public focus on Chinese and English. The 'world'
and 'world city' that emerge from such writing are historically
located in the transition before and after 1997, when the writers
acquired their languages in schools. They are also provisional,
generated by a poeisis of experimentation that attends to cultural
change as language change in - and as - everyday life.


http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a928267928~db=all~jumptype=rss

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