I was re-watching John Woo’s Hardboiled tonight and I was struck by something very odd. In a few scenes, English sneaks in, and not as part of the ‘song code’ that’s going on either. Phrases like “thank you” are used a few times, and it just struck me as very, very odd. They were said by the actors too, I think, and not dubbed in.
Can anybody explain why the characters were using English in a few places? I’d rather not guess wildly, and maybe someone understands enough to clear up my ignorance.
It’s a Hong Kong film, right? I imagine there are a whole lot of English phrases that have worked their way into the language in Hong Kong, especially for minor pleasantries like “thank you,” or “hello,” and so forth. Not so much different from watching an American film and seeing an otherwise English-only character say, “adios.”
I’d considered that, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
I’d like to know, if any Dopers know for sure, if English really has become part of the vernacular in Hong Kong to the point where it’s replaced native phrases that are equivalent of “thank you” and such. The idea seems somewhat fantastic and I’m not sure whether it’s just an HK cinema convention or if HK citizens are really likely to bust out into English phrases every now and again.
As you can see from this article, code-switching between Chinese (to be exact, Cantonese) and English is extremely common in Hong Kong:
I’m not sure why you consider this to be fantastic. Code-switching is very common in many parts of the world. We don’t get a very good idea in the U.S. of how common the simultaneous knowledge of several languages is. Most people in the world speak more than one language. Flipping back and forth between two of them is actually rather common.
Yes, it’s true. Honkies all have to study English in school, they watch movies, HK is a bi-lingual (tri if you count mandarin and quad if you count tagalog) city. Some English words become part of the local patois, especially among younger people or the hip set. Hardboiled is pretty old - I think from the early 90’s
Thanks very much for the information. I suppose I hadn’t internalized how divergent HK must be from mainland linguistic trends. Thanks for helping to clear up my ignorance.
Eh, just one of those things. Thanks for the link.
A couple of years ago at a film festival I attended there was a talk by a director after he showed his film. This was an Indian film where the language of the film was one of the Indian languages. The characters of the film (who were supposed to be middle class) were constantly throwing in English words in their conversations. When the director was asked about this, he said that this was quite characteristic of such people. It would have been unrealistic not to have them frequently code-switching. It’s only dorks like most Americans who stick to one language.
I don’t know how much it is “code switching” versus just common slang. Not to be pendantic, but at least to me code switching is having some level of fluency in multiple languages speaking with someone else that has some level of fluency in those same multiple languages. My wife and I code switch with Shanghaiese, Mandarin, English and Japanese.
In Hong Kong, especially with the type of gangsters in Hardboiled, it’s probably common borrowed words slang rather than any real fluency. I lived in HK for 5+ years, and there was a real range of Honky fluency. More Queen’s English than the British to a handful of common words like “ok” and “no.”
There are a few Honkies on the boards and maybe they can weigh in.
God, watch an Indian movie sometime. Even the older ones have constant English phrases in it. The better schools are English-medium. I figured it was the same thing.
You don’t even need to be able to speak multiple languages. Loan words aren’t that unusual. Especially as part of slang. Capishe?
Japanese, for instance, has a huge number of English loan words, to the despair of their traditional-minded language teachers. Well, the few who haven’t been driven to madness and suicide by the arbitrary cutisifcation of the language Japanese teen girls enjoy. So does German.
They don’t always end up meaning the same thing, of course. The (sorta) hero of Verses claims he prevented his (sorta) love interest from being slapped around because he was a “feminist.” The Japanese meaning is closer to the English word ‘gentlemen’ (being polite to women, opening doors for them, etc) but it ended up being a much better line only half-translated.
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I had hoped ‘rickrolling’ would evolve into a generalized term for misdirecting references is electronic media. If only because having some guy explain the derivation of it in 200 years would be hysterical.
Eh, even in the mainland English phrases are liberally sprinkled into the Mandarin of many folks, especially the young and fashionable. Just about everybody knows “hello,” “please,” “thank you,” “bye bye,” and even “fuck” or “shit,” and uses them to sound cool. And then there are the homegrown English phrases that mean nothing outside of China like, “Oh, my Lady Gaga.” In my part of the country it’s not uncommon to hear people throwing in Japanese and Russian phrases, too.
Yes, among my Indian relatives, rarely is a sentence spoken that has words from fewer than three languages in it. This seems particularly true for jokes – the punchline always seems to be in a language I don’t understand.
Anyway, in Bengali culture, there never have been any commonly used Bengali words for things like “thank you” or “damn you all to hell!” You can come up with words or phrases, but if you use them in conversation it sounds oddly literary. Those kinds of things are only ever said in English.