Mission

The origin of this dictionary sprung from the author's study of linguistics and translation at university and years of experience working in Hong Kong. For those who are seeking to understand the aims of this project, they can be summarised as follows:

i) Help foreigners understand the distinct variety of Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong, which includes many English terms that may not be taught in a formal Cantonese lesson.

ii) Minimise the impression of code-mixing as merely a convenient means of communication, and that it tends to be viewed as negative for language development by the education sector.

iii) Investigate whether the concept of class from the English language could be incorporated into the Cantonese language through code-mixing.

iv) Present language from the perspective of linguistics, in order to help people understand that any language can become nativised and widely accepted as long as there is a large number of language users.

v) Distinguish between different types of code-mixing used by different language groups, in order to eliminate people's biased judgements about code-mixing in general.

vi) With different language groups having varying degrees of code-mixing in Hong Kong, there may be a need to come up with a de facto standard of code-mixing in Hong Kong Cantonese so as to unite all language users, especially if code-mixing is a marker of solidarity among Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong.