ABSTRACT
The author’s study of 粵語 Jyut6 jyu5 (“Cantonese”) has taken him on a long, uniquely personal odyssey of unending learning, discovery, and creation that began five decades ago when he first heard the staccato sounds of Cantonese broadcast over the airwaves by a radio station located a few blocks away in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A few years later, curious about the claim that Cantonese was a sister language of Mandarin/Putonghua which he had already started learning, he took advantage of the opportunity to undertake the formal study of Cantonese at the Stanford Center in Taipei, Taiwan with an overseas Chinese teacher who was originally from Vietnam. He continued studying Cantonese as an exchange student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; it was during this time that he noticed how ordinary Hongkongers’ pronunciation of Cantonese deviated strikingly from that of his teacher and textbooks; these observations provided the catalyst for his PhD research a few years later on sociolinguistically based phonetic variation and change in Hong Kong Cantonese on which was based his PhD dissertation. From being a student of Cantonese, the author moved on to becoming an academic focused on researching such topics as Cantonese phonology, English loanwords, its written form, its non-Sinitic substratum, and ultimately, its future development in Hong Kong.
