Language policy, 'Asia's world city' and anglophone Hong Kong writing

Language policy, 'Asia's world city' and anglophone Hong Kong writing

• Ho, Elaine Yee Lin University of Hong Kong

Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 12(3), 428-441, 2010

Routledge

2010

• F Learning & Teaching
  • FE Medium of Instruction, Language of Teaching, Bi-& Multilingual Education, Problems of Bilingualism, Code-mixing & Code-switching
• R Educational Policy & Administration
  • RC Educational Planning & Decision Making Process, Educational Administration
• P Social Context of Education
  • PE Law & Education ; Politics & Education

Education, Bilingual Chinese English Language China Asia Language and Literacy Literature Transnationalism

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Unknown or Unspecified

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.
[Copyright of Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2010.516100]

• English

Journal Articles

• 1369801X

• 10.1080/1369801X.2010.516100

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/2bc55fce

2011-01-20