SECONDARY STUDENT HO Wong-ching can't wait to wrap her tongue around new slang words. The 16-year-old admits to being a fan of the most up-to-date slang because it marks her out as being trendy. She's like form seven graduate Liu Ming-wai, 19, who says it's just not cool to be heard using yesterday's terms.
Throughout the ages, slang has always been considered a reflection of its society, especially its youth culture. And with Hong Kong's society undergoing massive change in recent years, its language is taking a battering.
Linguists and youth workers say new terms are entering everyday conversation at an unprecedented rate, due to factors such as the influence of new migrants, a more competitive environment encouraging new trends, and a broadening of the media to include less highbrow language.
Youth social worker Bottle Shiu Ka-chun says slang is moving into the mainstream. 'Before, only teenagers spoke slang, but now even educated people use it,' he says. 'The life of each term is much shorter than it used to be. For the whole 1980s and 90s, we used the term kau [mixing] for courting; now we used gai [cutting open]. New terms keep coming up.'
Cantonese expert Dr Virginia Yip Choy-yin, acting chairperson and professor of the department of linguistics and modern languages of the Chinese University of Hong Kong agrees. 'More people are speaking slang,' she says. 'It's an 'in' thing to do. Youths are deliberately capturing new phrases ... Hong Kong is like a factory churning out these interesting expressions.'
These days, slang expressions can be found everywhere - on the streets, at home and in the work place, on TV and in movies and in adverts. Stars speak it, as do office boys, executives, radio hosts and legislators.