Given the authenticity and omnipresence of Cantonese use across spoken and written modalities in contemporary Hong Kong, this paper argues that there is much scope for disambiguating and systematising the place of Cantonese lexis in the local Chinese language curriculum. As a sensitising device, the proposed classificatory model highlights the role of lexical borrowings in the constitution of contemporary Cantonese lexis, whilst decentring a primarily Mandarin-based approach to research and practice. Examples of authentic Cantonese use were used to illustrate the histories and etymology of key lexical categories and sub-categories as found in the city’s linguistic landscape. This paper proposes a tripartite model describing the lexical categories across different registers and levels of formality in the Cantonese language in contemporary Hong Kong: (i) native Cantonese words, (ii) Sino-Cantonese words, and (iii) Anglo-Cantonese words. In this framework, the careers of major languages (excluding European empires) are narrated: Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek in West Asia Greek (again) and Latin in the Mediterranean and Europe the sprouting and interaction of languages before European conquests in the Americas, and in Africa Sanskrit, Persian, and later Malay in Southeast Asia, the interplay of Putonghua with other Chinese dialects across East Asia and the rise of Hindi-Urdu in South Asia. Other paths, for decline of a lingua franca, include Ruin or Resignation, if the user community dissolves, and Relegation, if the use of the language is deliberately banned. A lingua franca depends for its survival on the continuation in force of one or other of these motives, unless some user population adopts it as a mother-tongue, passing it on in the home, or dropping it for one purpose only to take it up afresh for another: this is Regeneration. It recognizes four principal motives for developing a lingua franca: commerce, conquest, religious conversion, and cultural attraction. This chapter concerns the life-histories of lingua francas, languages adopted for communication among speakers who do not otherwise share a language. This study demonstrated the impact of regional L2 accents on Beijing listeners’ perception of Mandarin tones, laying a foundation for better understanding of how native listeners perceive non-native tone production. This indicates that although native Beijing listeners reliably recognize regionally accented tones, the phonetic differences of regional accents from Mandarin modulates their tone identification. While they identified the words with high accuracy (> 90%) in all four accents, the regionally accented words produced lower ratings and longer decision times than Beijing stimuli. For each word, they selected one of four minimal tone quadruplet words and rated its similarity to Beijing pronunciation. Native Beijing listeners (n = 35) heard Mandarin words (/ba, di, du, gu/ × 4 tones) produced by speakers of the three regional dialects and by Beijing speakers (baseline). This study investigated how native Beijing listeners categorize and rate second language (L2) Mandarin tones produced by Yantai, Shanghai, and Guangzhou speakers, whose native dialect tone systems differ from Mandarin and from each other. The four lexical tones of standard Beijing Mandarin (henceforth, Mandarin), i.e., level, rising, dipping, and falling, are produced with regional accents by speakers from other regions of China. It is the only dialect which has attained a level of prestige that rivals that of the standard national language, and which has evolved written forms of its own that are commonly used in informal genres of media discourses. In the two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong, and Macao, Cantonese continues to serve as a lingua franca among the Chinese there. In Taiwan, as a result of some four decades of hegemonic enforcement of the National Language Movement until 1987, an absolute majority of the Taiwanese can understand and speak Mandarin, but Southern Min continues to be commonly used in the southern parts of the island, partly because for many Taiwanese, language choice is closely bound up with national and ethnolinguistic identity. This is why the promotion of putonghua among dialect speakers continues to be an important part of the language policy and planning of the People's Republic. It is however not yet widely spoken in many dialect areas of China. As a national lingua franca, Mandarin Chinese or putonghua 2 is unsurpassed in terms of the number of speakers. This discussion provides current perspectives on the use of Chinese as a lingua franca among the Han peoples of greater China.
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