Lam, Cindy Man-FongCindy Man-FongLamDr. CHAN Kin WingWong, Sheung PingSheung PingWong2025-07-252025-07-252024Lam, M. F., Chan, K. W., & Wong, S. P. (11.5.2024). Acquisition of spoken Chinese for multilingual ethnic minorities in Hong Kong: The effects of standard written Chinese on Cantonese. International Symposium on Language Sciences (ISLS): Interdisciplinary Research and the Legacy of Yuen Ren Chao, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.https://www.polyu.edu.hk/fh/docdrive/ISLS_Parallel%20Sessions%20&%20Abstracts-20240506.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/24098Non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students in the Hong Kong school system constitute a diverse population of learners with different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. In the case of South Asian students, they typically command a multilingual repertoire, including their native first language, English, Cantonese, and very limited Putonghua (Hua et al., 2020). Existing literature (Ku et al., 2005; Li, 2017; Tsung & Gao, 2012) has consistently reported on the challenges that these students face in developing their reading and writing abilities using standard written Chinese (SWC), resulting in the ungrammatical codemixing of spoken Cantonese elements in their written Chinese texts (Chan, 2018; Chan, 2019). Conversely, little attention has been given to the reverse phenomenon of SWC features permeating the Cantonese speech of NCS students. This study explores the interaction between Cantonese and SWC in the oral language of NCS students, presenting an empirical analysis based on a sample from two primary and two secondary schools (n=82), comprising a test group of 60 NCS students and a control group of 22 native Chinese-speaking (CS) students. Within the test group, the average duration of a Cantonese learning experience for each school was 5.31, 7.00, 12.12 and 9.00 years, respectively. To elicit speech production, all students participated in an oral storytelling task using the wordless illustrated storybook Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). A native Cantonese speaker then transcribed these narratives to examine distinctive linguistic features present among different renditions of the story, with 15 SWC categories emerging through the process of transcript annotation. Despite the complete absence of textual cues, SWC elements were observed in the narrations of 50 NCS students (83.33%), whereas only ten NCS students narrated the story entirely in vernacular Cantonese. In terms of lexicon, various alternations were observed across different part-of-speech categories, including SWC realizations for both lexical (e.g., 衣服 ji1fuk4 for “clothes”, 生氣 sang1hei3 for “angry”) and grammatical words (e.g., 他 taa1 and 他們 taa1mun4 for third-person pronouns, 和 wo4 for “and”). Regarding morphological features, 29 NCS students (48.33%) employed diminutive forms using the standard prefix 小 siu2- rather than the vernacular suffix 仔 -zai2 to refer to characters in the story (e.g., 小狗 siu2-gau2 rather than 狗仔 gau2-zai2 for “little dog”), as did nine CS students (40.91%). However, the NCS students applied siu2- to more lexical items, resulting in overgeneralization. Moreover, five NCS students (8.33%) used 的 dik1 to link modifiers and noun phrases, and eight used the standard suffix -地 -dei6 to derive adverbs from adjectives. Both tendencies were not observed among the control group. This study is significant in documenting lexical and morphological phenomena resulting from the unconscious blending of vernacular Cantonese and SWC in the Cantonese speech of NCS students with intermediate or near-native oral Cantonese proficiency. The inadvertent integration of SWC elements reflects the impact of acquiring Cantonese and SWC simultaneously yet through different modes of acquisition and separate language domains. Further studies are warranted to examine whether such blending phenomena constitute systematic patterns.enNon-Chinese Speaking (NCS) StudentsHong KongMultilingualismSpoken CantoneseStandard Written Chinese (SWC)Teaching Cantonese As a Second Language (TCSL)Conference Paper