Language use in social media marketing in Hong Kong: Variation and attitudes

Hong Kong, a Cantonese-speaking metropolis with a British colonial history, now a special administrative region of China, has a fascinating sociolinguistic environment. Robust language contact and mixing have never ceased in various domains in this multilingual city; in the digital age, the most diversified and innovative language practices are often found in social media. Taking advantage of the unprecedented communication capacity of social media, both the private and the public sectors in Hong Kong have been increasingly making their appearances on social networking sites, so as to maximise their opportunities to reach the public. The main objectives of the proposed PhD project are to demonstrate the linguistic diversity in social media marketing in Hong Kong, investigate the motivations behind specific language practices, and study people's perceptions on the various language choices. In order to achieve these purposes, language practices in a selection of social media pages operated by commercial as well as governmental organisations are examined; viewpoints of marketing text producers and receivers are solicited by means of questionnaires and interviews. By conducting an integrative analysis of the empirical data collected from different sources, the project aspires to shed light on the complex interrelations between different agents and sociolinguistic factors involved in the production and reception of marketing texts, and to deduce implications pertaining to marketing-related language behaviour and perception, while furthering the understanding of language phenomena in computer-mediated communication. Through the investigation of sociolinguistic development and electronic discourse in Hong Kong, the dissertation will also contribute to the context-specific study of language attitudes as well as to the discussion of the evolution of world Englishes.