Since 2015 when the Facebook page Kongish Daily was established, the use of Kongish has been warmly embraced by younger generations in Hong Kong, who are usually Cantonese-English-Chinese multilinguals. Kongish users are typically multilingual L2 English speakers who tap into the full range of their semiotic repertoire to innovate and communicate, especially in digital communication. As Kongish comprises a complex range of linguistic and non-linguistic elements and thus argued to be different from Hong Kong English as traditionally defined, it is interesting to examine how users view their identity and how they perceive the language.

This paper starts with a theoretical motivation to address the relationship between translingual practices and identity construction. We report our quantitative and qualitative data regarding Kongish users’ language identity and perception. An online questionnaire (N=337) was distributed to and completed by secondary and university students, and young professionals in their 20s and 30s. We further conducted semi-structured interviews (N=30) to understand Kongish users’ views on the matters, such as self-positioning, motivation, and prospect prediction, etc. We argue that Kongish has emerged as a well-received translingual practice among Generations Y and Z; such practice facilitates the construction of self-image or identity as being an educated and cosmopolitan Hong Konger in the 21st Century.

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