Languages Of Hong Kong
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Languages Of Hong Kong
The Basic Law of Hong Kong states that English and Chinese are the two official languages of Hong Kong. During the British colonial era, English was the sole official language until 1978 but has remained a strong second language in Hong Kong. As the majority of the population in Hong Kong are descendants of migrants from China's Canton Province, the vast majority speak standard Cantonese or other Yue Chinese varieties as a first language, with smaller numbers of speakers of Hakka Language or the Teochew dialect of Southern Min. In addition, immigrants and expatriates from the West and other Asian countries have contributed much to Hong Kong's linguistic and demographic diversity. The geographical element of this diversity can be seen in the Hong Kong Language Maps, which shows oral languages from the 2011 Census, and oral and written languages from the 2016 Census. Statistics for the 27 self-reported spoken languages/dialects reported in the 2011 Census, can be found in the rep ...
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Queen's Road, Hong Kong
Queen's Road is a collection of roads along the northern coast of Hong Kong Island, in Hong Kong, within the limit of Victoria City. It was the first road in Hong Kong, constructed by the British between 1841 and 1843, spanning across Victoria City from Shek Tong Tsui to Wan Chai. At various points along the route, Queen's Road marks the original shoreline before land reclamation projects permanently extended land into Victoria Harbour. The four sections of the roads are, from west to east: Queen's Road West ( Chinese: 皇后大道西), Queen's Road Central (皇后大道中), Queensway (金鐘道), and Queen's Road East (皇后大道東). History The road was originally 4 miles (6.5 km) long. The Royal Engineers built the first section to Sai Ying Pun with the help of 300 coolies from Kowloon (Hong Kong), then a territory of China. This section of Queen's Road ran parallel to the beach where Sir Henry Pottinger set up his tent in 1842. Originally named Main Stre ...
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French Language
French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the ( Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French. French is an official language in 29 countries across multiple continents, most of which are members of the '' Organisation internationale de la Francopho ...
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British Hong Kong
Hong Kong was a British colony, colony and later a British Dependent Territory, dependent territory of the British Empire from 1841 to 1997, apart from a period of occupation under the Japanese Empire from Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, 1941 to 1945 during the Pacific War. The colonial period began with the British occupation of Hong Kong Island in 1841, during the First Opium War between the British and the Qing dynasty. The Qing had wanted to enforce its prohibition of opium importation within the dynasty that was being exported mostly from British India, as it was causing widespread addiction among its populace. The island was ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Nanking, ratified by the Daoguang Emperor in the aftermath of the war of 1842. It was established as a crown colony in 1843. In 1860, the British took the opportunity to expand the colony with the addition of the Kowloon Peninsula after the Second Opium War, while the Qing was embroiled in handling the Taiping Rebe ...
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Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta in South China. With 7.5 million residents of various nationalities in a territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. Hong Kong is also a major global financial centre and one of the most developed cities in the world. Hong Kong was established as a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island from Xin'an County at the end of the First Opium War in 1841 then again in 1842.. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898... British Hong Kong was occupied by Imperial Japan from 1941 to 1945 during World War II; British administration resumed afte ...
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Official Language
An official language is a language given supreme status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction. Typically the term "official language" does not refer to the language used by a people or country, but by its government (e.g. judiciary, legislature, and/or administration). 178 countries recognize an official language, 101 of them recognizing more than one. The government of Italy made Italian official only in 1999, and some nations (such as the United States, Mexico and Australia) have never declared de jure official languages at the national level. Other nations have declared non-indigenous official languages. Many of the world's constitutions mention one or more official or national languages. Some countries use the official language designation to empower indigenous groups by giving them access to the government in their native languages. In countries that do not formally designate an official language, a ''de facto'' national language usually evolves. English is ...
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Hong Kong Basic Law
The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China is a national law of China that serves as the organic law for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). Comprising nine chapters, 160 articles and three annexes, the Basic Law was composed to implement Annex I of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. The Basic Law was enacted under the Constitution of China when it was adopted by the National People's Congress on 4 April 1990 and came into effect on 1 July 1997 when Hong Kong was transferred from the United Kingdom to China. It replaced Hong Kong's colonial constitution of the Letters Patent and the Royal Instructions. Drafted on the basis of the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law lays out the basic policies of China on Hong Kong, including the "one country, two systems" principle, such that the socialist governance and economic system then practised in mainland China would not be extended to Hong Kong. Instead, ...
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Hong Kong English
Hong Kong English is a variety of the English language native to Hong Kong. The variant is either a learner interlanguage or emergent variant, primarily a result of Hong Kong's British overseas territory history and the influence of native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. Background English is one of two official languages in Hong Kong – the other being Chinese (Cantonese), and is used in academia, business and the courts, as well as in most Government materials. Major businesses routinely issue important material in both Chinese and English, and all road and government signs are bilingual. Since the Handover, English in Hong Kong remains primarily a second language, in contrast to Singapore where English has been shifting toward being a first language. The falling English proficiency of local English language teachers has come under criticism. The proportion of the Hong Kong population who report using English (that is, all forms) as their "usual spoken language" incr ...
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Hong Kong Cantonese
Hong Kong Cantonese is a dialect of the Cantonese language of the Sino-Tibetan family. Although Hongkongers refer to the language as "''Cantonese''" (), publications in mainland China describe the variant as ''Hong Kong dialect'' (), due to the differences between the pronunciation used in Hong Kong Cantonese and that of the Cantonese spoken in neighbouring Guangdong Province where Cantonese (based on the Guangzhou dialect) is a '' lingua franca''. Over the years, Hong Kong Cantonese has also absorbed foreign terminology and developed a large set of Hong Kong-specific terms. Code-switching with English is also common. These are the result of British rule between 1841 and 1997, as well as the closure of the Hong Kong–mainland China border immediately after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. History Before the arrival of British settlers in 1842, the inhabitants of Hong Kong mainly spoke the Dongguan-Bao'an (Tungkun–Po'on) and Tanka dialects o ...
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Mtr Keyboard 1
The Mass Transit Railway (MTR) is a major public transport network serving :Hong Kong. Operated by the MTR Corporation Limited (MTRCL), it consists of heavy rail, light rail, and feeder bus service centred on a 10-line rapid transit network serving the urbanised areas of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories. The system included of rail as of 2022 with 167 stations, including 98 heavy rail stations, 68 light rail stops and one high-speed rail terminus. Under the government's rail-led transport policy, the MTR system is a common mode of public transport in Hong Kong, with over five million trips made in an average weekday. It consistently achieves a 99.9 per cent on-time rate on its train journeys. As of 2018, the MTR has a 49.3 per cent share of the franchised public transport market, making it the most popular transport option in Hong Kong. The integration of the Octopus smart card fare-payment technology into the MTR system in September 1997 has furthe ...
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Bopomofo
Bopomofo (), or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin (), is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin, it may also be used to transcribe other varieties of Chinese, particularly other varieties of Mandarin Chinese dialects, as well as Taiwanese Hokkien. Consisting of 37 characters and five tone marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Bopomofo was first introduced in China by the Republican government in the 1910s and was used alongside the Wade–Giles system for romanization purposes, which used a modified Latin alphabet. Today, Bopomofo is now more common in Taiwan than on the Chinese mainland, and is after Hanyu Pinyin used as a secondary electronic input method for writing Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan as well as in dictionaries or other non-official documents. Etymology Bopomofo is the name used by the ISO and Unicode. ''Zhuyin'' () literally means phon ...
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Dayi Method
Dayi (, literally "big easy") is a system for entering Chinese characters on a standard QWERTY keyboard using a set of 46 character components. A character is built by combining up to four of the 46 characters (the other six are provided for typing Taiwanese addresses), using a system similar to that of Cangjie, but is decomposed in stroke order instead of in geometric shape in Cangjie. On most keyboards in Taiwan, most keys show four symbols. On the keys, the Latin letters are in the upper left, Bopomofo symbols on the upper right, Cangjie symbols on the lower left, and Dayi symbols on the lower right. Layout Like Cangjie, every radical has some auxiliary shapes; but some of the auxiliary shapes of one radical originate from the mnemonic word of the radical. For example, key 6 is mapped to 車(car) in the keyboard, its mnemonic word is "6片車門"(six pieces of car door), and its auxiliary shapes include "片"(piece), "爿"(old character for "wall", its shape is the reflection ...
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Cangjie Input Method
The Cangjie input method (Tsang-chieh input method, sometimes called Changjie, Cang Jie, Changjei or Chongkit) is a system for entering Chinese characters into a computer using a standard computer keyboard. In filenames and elsewhere, the name Cangjie is sometimes abbreviated as cj. The input method was invented in 1976 by Chu Bong-Foo, and named after Cangjie (Tsang-chieh), the mythological inventor of the Chinese writing system, at the suggestion of Chiang Wei-kuo, the former Defense Minister of Taiwan. Chu Bong-Foo released the patent for Cangjie in 1982, as he thought that the method should belong to Chinese cultural heritage. Therefore, Cangjie has become open-source software and is on every computer system that supports traditional Chinese characters, and it has been extended so that Cangjie is compatible with the simplified Chinese character set. Cangjie is the first Chinese input method to use the QWERTY keyboard. Chu saw that the QWERTY keyboard had become an inte ...
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