Hong Kong Cantonese

Hong Kong Cantonese is a dialect of Cantonese spoken primarily in Hong Kong. As the most commonly spoken language in Hong Kong, it shares a recent and direct lineage with the Guangzhou dialect.
Due to the colonial heritage of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Cantonese exhibits distinct differences in vocabulary and certain speech patterns. Over the years, Hong Kong Cantonese has also absorbed foreign terminology and developed a large set of Hong Kong-specific terms. Code-switching with English is also common.
As of 2021, 88.2% of Hong Kong's population identified Cantonese as their "usual spoken language," while 93.7% reported being able to speak it.
The specific IETF code for Cantonese written with traditional Han characters as used in Hong Kong is yue-Hant-HK.

Name

Hong Kong Cantonese is predominantly referred to as "Cantonese" in English and gwong2 dung1 waa2 by its native speakers, while the government also officially refers to it as gwong2 zau1 waa2.

History

Before the arrival of British settlers in 1842, the inhabitants of Hong Kong mainly spoke the Dongguan-Bao'an and Tanka dialects of Yue, as well as Hakka and Hokkien. These languages and dialects are all remarkably different from Guangzhou Cantonese, and not mutually intelligible.
After the British acquired Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories from the Qing in 1841 and 1898, large numbers of merchants and workers came to Hong Kong from the city of Canton, the main centre of Cantonese. Cantonese became the dominant spoken language in Hong Kong. The extensive migration from mainland Cantonese-speaking areas to Hong Kong continued up until 1949, when the Communists took over mainland China.
In 1949, the year that the People's Republic of China was established, Hong Kong saw a large influx of refugees from mainland China, prompting the Hong Kong Government to close its border. Illegal immigration from mainland China into Hong Kong nevertheless continued. During the 1950s, the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong remained very similar to that in Canton, but the proportion of Cantonese speakers did not surpass 50% of the population in Hong Kong.
Movement, communication and relations between Hong Kong and mainland China became very limited, and consequently the evolution of Cantonese in Hong Kong diverged from that of Guangzhou. In mainland China, the use of Mandarin as the official language and in education was enforced. In Hong Kong, Cantonese was the medium of instruction in schools, along with written English and written Chinese. As such, since the 1970s the percentage of Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong has risen to about 90%.
Because of the long exposure to English during the colonial period, a large number of English words were loaned into Hong Kong Cantonese, e.g. "巴士", from the English "bus"; compare this with the equivalent from Standard Mandarin, 公共汽車. Consequently, the vocabularies of Cantonese in mainland China and Hong Kong substantially differ. Moreover, the pronunciation of Cantonese changed while the change either did not occur in mainland China or took place much more slowly. For example, merging of initial into and the deletion of were observed.

Phonology

In modern-day Hong Kong, many native speakers no longer distinguish between certain phoneme pairs, leading to instances of sound change through mergers. Although considered non-standard and denounced as "lazy sound" by purists, the phenomena are widespread and not restricted to Hong Kong. Contrary to impressions, some of these changes are not recent. The loss of the velar nasal was documented by Williams, and the substitution of the liquid nasal for the nasal initial was documented by Cowles.
List of observed shifts:

Merging of initial into initial.
Merging of initial into null initial.
Merging of and initials into and when followed by. Note that is the only glide in Cantonese.
Merging of and codas into and codas respectively, eliminating contrast between these pairs of finals : -, -, -, -, - and -.
Merging of the two syllabic nasals, into, eliminating the contrast of sounds between wiktionary:吳 and wiktionary:唔.
Merging of the rising tones.

In educated Hong Kong Cantonese speech, these sound mergers are avoided, and many older speakers still distinguish between those phoneme categories. With the sound changes, the name of Hong Kong's Hang Seng Bank, Jyutping:,, literally Hong Kong Constant Growth Bank, becomes, sounding like Hon' Kon' itchy body 'un cold. The name of Cantonese itself would be Jyutping:, IPA: without the merger, whereas and are overwhelmingly common in Hong Kong.
The shift affects the way some Hong Kong people speak other languages as well. This is especially evident in the pronunciation of certain English names: "Nicole" pronounce, "Nancy" pronounce etc. A very common example of the mixing of and is that of the word wiktionary:你, meaning "you". Even though the standard pronunciation should be, the word is often pronounced, which is the surname wiktionary:李, or the word wiktionary:理, meaning theory. The merger of and also affects the choice of characters when the Cantonese media transliterates foreign names.
Prescriptivists who try to correct these "lazy sounds" often end up introducing hypercorrections. For instance, while attempting to ensure that people pronounce the initial, they may introduce it into words which have historically had a null-initial. One common example is that of the word wiktionary:愛, meaning "love", where even though the standard pronunciation is Jyutping:, IPA:, the word is often pronounced Jyutping:,. A similar phenomenon occurs in various Mandarin dialects.

Unique phrases and expressions

Hong Kong Cantonese has developed a number of phrases and expressions that are unique to the context of Hong Kong. Examples are:

Colloquial Cantonese Expressions	Literally	Colloquially	Explanation
串 Example: 你洗唔洗咁串呀! English: Do you have to be so harsh?	skewer/to string/vulgar	harsh/extreme bluntness, lack of tact	colloquial usage for police handcuffing, broadened to incorporate harsh expression generally; alternatively, by modification of the tone value for "vulgar"

Loanwords

Life in Hong Kong is characterised by the blending of southern Chinese with other Asian and Western cultures, as well as the city's position as a major international business centre. In turn, Hong Kong influences have spread widely into other cultures. As a result, a large number of loanwords are created in Hong Kong and then exported to mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan. Some of the loanwords have become even more popular than their Chinese counterparts, in Hong Kong as well as in their destination cultures. Note that some of the loanwords are being used much more frequently in Cantonese-speaking areas in mainland China, than in areas speaking other Chinese varieties.

Imported loanwords

Selected loanwords are shown below.

From English

From French

From Japanese

Exported loanwords

Into English

English	Chinese Characters	Jyutping
add oil	加油	gaa¹ jau²
bok choy	白菜	baak⁶ coi³
chop chop	速速	cuk¹ cuk¹
chop suey	雜碎	zaap⁶ seoi³
ketchup	茄汁	ke² zap¹
kowtow	叩頭	kau³ tau⁴
kwai muk	桂木	kwai³ muk⁶
typhoon	颱風	toi⁴ fung¹

Into Mainland Chinese Mandarin

Into Taiwanese Mandarin

Into Japanese

Code-switching and loanword adaptation

Hong Kong Cantonese has a high number of foreign loanwords. Sometimes, the parts of speech of the incorporated words are changed. In some examples, some new meanings of English words are even created. For example, "至yeah", literally "the most yeah", means "the trendiest". Originally, "yeah" means "yes/okay" in English, but it means "trendy" when being incorporated into Hong Kong Cantonese.
Semantic change is common in loanwords; when foreign words are borrowed into Cantonese, polysyllabic words and monosyllabic words tend to become disyllabic, and the second syllable is in the Upper Rising tone. For example, "kon₁ si₂" , "sek⁶ kiu¹" and "ka¹ si²". A few polysyllabic words become monosyllabic though, like "mon¹", literally means computer monitor. And some new Cantonese lexical items are created according to the morphology of Cantonese. For example, "laai¹ 記" from the word "library". Most of the disyllabic words and some of the monosyllabic words are incorporated as their original pronunciation, with some minor changes according to the Cantonese phonotactics.
Incorporating words from foreign languages into Cantonese is acceptable to most Cantonese speakers. Hong Kong Cantonese speakers frequently code-mix although they can distinguish foreign words from Cantonese ones. For instance, "噉都唔 make sense", literally means "that doesn't make sense". After a Cantonese speaker decides to code-mix a foreign word in a Cantonese sentence, syntactical rules of Cantonese will be followed. For instance, "sure" can be used like "你 su¹ 唔 su¹ aa³?" as if it were its Cantonese counterpart "你肯唔肯定?", using the A-not-A question construction.
In some circumstances, code-mixing is preferable because it can simplify sentences. An excellent example of the convenience and efficiency of such mixing is "打 collect call" replacing "打一個由對方付款嘅長途電話", i.e. 13 syllables reduced to four.