Chinese Englishes: A sociolinguistic history (review)

This book investigates the history of English in China from the early seventeenth century to the present. Kingsley Bolton gathers together and examines an extensive amount of historical, linguistic, and sociolinguistic research on the description and analysis of English in China, particularly in Hong Kong. He explores a variety of sources in order to unearth the somewhat forgotten history of English in China and to demonstrate how contemporary Hong Kong English derives from Chinese pidgin English. This book also discusses the varying status of English in mainland China over different historical periods and its recent developments since 1997.

The book consists of five chapters. In Ch. 1, B critically reviews current approaches to research in Asian Englishes and World Englishes, which include corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, the sociology of language, pidgin and creole studies, and critical linguistics, among others. He then discusses the relevance of these perspectives to the study of English in Hong Kong and China. Ch. 2 provides a sociolinguistic description of English in Hong Kong. B first examines the sociopolitical history of Hong Kong from approximately 1980 to 1997, the year when Hong Kong was handed over to China. He then, from a historical as well as a contemporary perspective, introduces the language background in Hong Kong to highlight the dynamics of the multilingual Hong Kong society.

In Ch. 3, B focuses on revealing the ‘forgotten past’ of the English language in southern China, which starts with the arrival of the first English-speaking merchants in the early seventeenth century, continues with the ‘Canton jargon’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and reaches into the current ‘Hong Kong English’. To do so, B employed the research methodology of the ‘archaeology’ of English, which is historical and textual in nature. As the author claims, this approach assumes an essential role in research on the history of World Englishes.

Ch. 4 deals with the status, functions, and features of English in contemporary Hong Kong. In this chapter, B addresses the recognition of Hong Kong English, the ideologies of English in Hong Kong, and the creativity of Hong Kong English in both literary and less formal contexts. In the last chapter, Ch. 5, B attempts to associate the history of English in Hong Kong and southern China with that of mainland China. In so doing B surveys the teaching of the English language in China from the late Qing to the present. The survey shows that mainland China has its own history of English to tell, from the late Qing dynasty, through Republican China and the post-1949 era, to the present.

With its interdisciplinary perspective, this book will prove a very helpful reader not only to linguists, but also to all those working in the fields of Asian studies and English studies, including those concerned with cultural and literary studies.