THE GRAPHEMIC REPRESENTATION OF ENGLISH LOANWORDS IN CANTONESE

Down through the history of their contact over more than 200 years, Cantonese has borrowed many words from English and assimilated them into its lexicon primarily via phonetic transliteration. Although Cantonese has developed a written form, it has never been formally standardized. One result of the lack of standardization has been variation in both the phonetic and graphemic representations of loanwords, with some loanwords having two or more competing pronunciations and written forms; further, the means of graphemic representation also varies with some loanwords being written entirely with Chinese characters, or entirely with letters of the English alphabet, or in a combination of Chinese characters and letters together. Some degree of systematicity underlies this variability and so allows us to identify five main ways by which English loanwords are being graphemically represented in the contemporary Cantonese language of Hong Kong.