This article examines the relation between social class and language attitudes through a triangulated study that analyses the attitudes of 836 secondary school students from different socioeconomic backgrounds toward the 3 official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (HK; i.e., Cantonese, English, and Putonghua). The respondents were divided into 3 social class groups (viz. middle, lower-middle, and working class), according to their parents' occupations and levels of educational attainment. This particular group of students started its secondary school education when the mandatory Mother Tongue Education Policy was just implemented after China resumed sovereignty over HK. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey and focus-group interviews. This study was designed to test 2 hypotheses: (a) that the middle-class group would be the most positively inclined toward English and (b) that the working-class group would display the most positive attitudes toward Putonghua due to closer social distance. Although the results from the questionnaire survey appeared to provide a degree of support for both hypotheses, little evidence was found in the interview data to indicate that the working-class group did, in fact, aspire to Putonghua either as an alternative form of linguistic capital or a symbol of preferred social identity.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19313150903500945]

The gendered speech in a foreign language has been found to pose barriers for learners due to different gender norms associated with their mother tongue and the foreign language. The problem is especially serious with the masculine and feminine forms of speech in the Japanese language, as these are strongly linked with social inequality between men and women. While a number of previous studies have been conducted on feminine style of Japanese and foreign language learners, still little is known of masculine speech of Japanese and foreign professionals who use Japanese in their intercultural work contexts. The present paper investigates attitudes towards the use of masculine Japanese among Hong Kong professionals. It includes the finding that, unlike in monolingual contexts, in multilingual contexts masculine Japanese was perceived among the respondents as projecting not only the quality of Japanese masculinity but also of group solidarity and native speaker status in the language and culture. While the respondents felt that it could be an effective device for constructing their professional identity, the decision to use it appeared to involve a careful analysis of their professional contexts and identity considerations. The implications of the analysis for teaching Japanese as a foreign language are discussed.
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Subordinate femininity associated with feminine Japanese has been found to pose barriers for foreign language learners of Japanese, especially among Western female learners of Japanese. The present study investigates attitudes towards the use of both masculine and feminine Japanese among non-native professional speakers of Japanese. The latter's experiences can enlighten language educators in their efforts to help struggling learners cope with using language loaded with traditional gender roles and gender inequality. Data from interviews with male and female professionals who use Japanese in the courses of their work in Japanese companies in Hong Kong were used to study the problems posed by 'masculine' and 'feminine' Japanese for foreign learners of Japanese. It was found that Hong Kong professionals often use masculine and feminine Japanese in order to gain native-speaker status in the language. The study has implications not merely for the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language but also for the teaching of gendered aspects of foreign languages generally, especially when professional identity and status are involved.
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This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism.
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