“Tam Zai dialect”: language ideologies and indexicality of “non-standard” Cantonese in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper studies the language ideologies of standard and non-standard language of Hong Kong people in the post-colonial era, by demonstrating the dichotomy of standard and non-standard within the dialect Cantonese. Through the case study of a local commercial advertisement, I examine how the mediatised linguistic event was taken by the audiences through an analysis of the related metalinguistic online comments it aroused. By drawing on the framework of “orders of indexicality”, I demonstrate how “non-standard” Cantonese became indexical of the national power.