Then & NowThe accents of Hong Kong’s Eurasian, Portuguese communities are dying out – and with them a rich local culture, too

Cantonese first-language inter­ference with non-native English speakers’ pronunciation is widely known, and unconsciously amusing up-and-down inflections have been the butt of cruel humour for decades. Examples are legion; elision of L and R sounds into “flied lice” and the like are weary staples for racist-tinged “humorists”.

Less remembered are the distinctive accents – now largely vanished – of Hong Kong’s minority communities, for whom English was (mostly) a first tongue, yet heavily influenced by other languages. Until broader educational opportunities in recent decades dramatically reduced this speech variant, most Eurasian and local Portuguese English speakers had a distinctive, immediately recognisable “sound”, usually more deprecated than celebrated among themselves.

Insiders referred to this sing-song lilt as the “wah-wah-WAH” accent; well-constructed parody examples can be wickedly entertaining. Individuals whose life opportunities endowed them with an ability to code-switch at will into more socially prestigious pronunciation styles were – unsurprisingly – those who felt safest when cackling condescendingly at the speech patterns of others. Others, for whom “how they spoke” immediately and irrevocably positioned them as “who they were”, were rather less inclined to laugh.

Generally, but not always, this accent remained with women throughout their lives. Men, especially professionals in the legal and medical fields, worked assiduously to cultivate a “proper” British accent in order to get on in life (an Americanised intonation is currently preferred) and sometimes succeeded so thoroughly they never returned to their earlier spoken persona.

Others moved back and forth in terms of accent and general register, depending on the social circumstances they found themselves in, personal self-confidence, and the company they kept – or chose to avoid.