Gender and Language Attitudes: A Case of Postcolonial Hong Kong

Abstract

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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