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Four years after the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned from Britain to China, a survey was conducted in 2001 to examine the attitudes of students toward Cantonese (the vernacular language), English (the colonizer's and international language), and Putonghua (the new ruler's language) in the early postcolonial era of Hong Kong. Eight years after, as Hong Kong moved into the second decade after the political handover, which has been characterized by an intense interplay of localization, mainlandization, and internationalization, a follow-up study was launched in 2009 to trace the changes of language attitudes over the past years. This paper reports on a comparison between the results of the two surveys, which shows 'Pragmatic trilingualism' as a future trend for the younger generation of Hong Kong. Having experienced the postcolonial changes for twelve years, informants of the 2009 study also showed significantly more positive attitudes toward Putonghua than their counterparts in 2001, as the language starts to take root in Hong Kong society along with the huge economic and demographic power of China.

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism.gender is a more complex issue than simple biological differences. Adding new dimensions to the understanding of the relationship between gender and language, sociolinguists suggest that there are more social factors to take into consideration, for example, the relative power between males and females, their social networks and social status etc. (James, 1996).As previous research has established the significance of gender in the area of language attitudes, and yet not much attention has been paid to this in Hong Kong, the present research attempts to fill the gap by investigating the effect of gender on Hong Kong students' attitudes towards three languages, which were officially recognised in Hong Kong after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain in 1997. The three spoken languages are English (the international and the ex-coloniser's language), Cantonese (the vernacular language) and Putonghua (the national language of China, also known as Mandarin).The present study was carried out in two stages. First, a questionnaire survey was used to find out if gender contributes to any significant differences in the respondents' attitudes towards the three target languages. Being informed by the quantitative results, semi-structured group interviews were conducted to explore the possible reasons behind the significant attitudinal differences between the two gender groups. The present study is part of a bigger project, of which the global analysis of all questionnaires has been reported in Lai (2005). However, as language attitudes also vary with different factors, this study focuses on the effect of gender as an independent variable.In the following, the sociopolitical background of postcolonial Hong Kong will be first described to provide readers with the ne...

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Four years after the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned from Britain to China, a Matched-guised Test (MGT) was conducted to examine the subjective reactions of students to speakers of the three major spoken languages used in the city (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). Respondents were the first cohort of students under the mandatory mother tongue education policy, which was implemented one year after the political handover. Eight years after, when further socio-economic changes had taken place in Hong Kong, the MGT was administered again to find out the attitudes of the younger generation towards the three languages. Although English and Cantonese distinctly excelled in different domains in the first test, the second MGT shows signs of power redistribution among the languages. This paper is to report a comparison between the two tests and thereby uncover the directions of language shift in Hong Kong.