[ESSAY] “From Fife to the Fragrant Harbour: On Learning to Love Hong Kong English” by Stewart McKay
Me at the pier in Stanley, 2012, the year I first arrived in Hong Kong
I speak English. And I have an accent. All speakers of English have an accent, whether they like it or not. If Chinese is a language of dialects, then English is a language of accents.
I grew up in Fife, Scotland. The accent I inherited is not one of the more notorious Scottish accents, such as the rapid-fire, nasal Glaswegian. Nor is it one of the more pleasant: it bears no comparison to a Highland brogue, or to the lilting, posh tones of southside Edinburgh. Fifers speak slowly and gutturally, freely dropping consonants.
In my early twenties, I moved south to Durham, in England’s north-east. Though only two hours away by train, it was a land with an entirely different soundscape. The Geordie accent is sing-song and vowel-shifting, and rich in regional vocabulary. For non-native speakers of English, and for native speakers too, it is famously difficult to comprehend.
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From the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Britain underwent a reckoning with her regional accents. In the Britain into which I was born, it was still common for television and radio presenters to speak in clipped BBC English. Accents were reserved for characters, used for comic effect or for playing the villain. Nowadays, it is far more common to hear a regional accent reading the ten o’clock news or presenting a similarly serious programme. Studies suggest that Received Pronunciation will become obsolete in Britain within the next forty years.
These years of coming to terms with our accents coincided almost perfectly with my childhood and adolescence. Yet I still grew up with a hangover from an earlier era, surrounded by older relatives and teachers who instilled in us the belief (not wholly unfounded) that many would regard our accent as inferior, and that there would be times when we would have to switch between it and “proper” English.
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And then, aged twenty-six, I moved to Hong Kong, where I heard an entirely new, entirely glorious form of English. Far be it from this gweilo to patronise or fetishise, but I have grown to love Hong Kong English. It is a form of English with as much variety, as much history and as much to be proud of as any other. Sadly, however, whereas in modern Britain accents and local terms are now widely heard and bound up with pride in one’s hometown or county, I find that Hong Kongers can be decidedly negative about their English.
And it is “their” English. In technical terms, Hong Kong English is an official variant of English, with a recognisable accent, an established vocabulary and an identifiable history. Debate continues as to whether it is an established or unestablished variant (a language passes through four stages before officially becoming a variant), and therein lies the problem. Hong Kong English occupies an in-between state; that is to say, it exists, but nobody is taking ownership of it.
What is to blame for this lack of pride? Perhaps we cannot expect the government to promote Hong Kong English, given the territory’s tempestuous post-colonial journey. Nevertheless, English remains very much present in Hong Kong, and is still an official language. From MTR announcements to lifeguard warnings at the beach to government press releases, all must have an English version.
Like two competitive cousins, Hong Kong and Singapore suffer from constant comparison, Singapore being the well-behaved high achiever and Hong Kong the slightly messier but more loveable one. Singaporeans take great pride in their Singlish. The government there has also softened its stance: the “Speak Good English Movement” of the early 2000s has given way to an acceptance of code-switching, and to the incorporation of Singlish into some of its campaigns.
There may well be good reasons for Singaporeans’ more comfortable relationship with their English. The city-state ranks highest in Asia for English ability (the 2024 English Proficiency Index placed Singapore first, with a score of 609 out of 800, and Hong Kong a still respectable fourth, with 549). This has perhaps given Singaporeans the confidence to be more playful with the language. Singapore is also several decades further along its post-colonial journey away from the land that bestowed English upon it, while its multiculturalism means that much of Singlish also draws on Hokkien, Malay and the languages of the Indian subcontinent. The comparison with Singapore is worth making, then, though it is not entirely valid.
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Why, then, as an English teacher in Hong Kong with a decade and a half’s experience, do I often find Hong Kongers’ attitudes towards their English frustrating? And why, as someone with a Scottish accent (albeit one softened by time away from my homeland and by my teaching career), does this stir up less-than-fond memories?
First, I have often been told by native Hong Kongers that my accent is “not too strong”, or not “too difficult to understand”. This is intended as a compliment, I am sure, but it is hard to take as one. Why should not sounding Scottish be a positive thing? (On visits to my hometown, I have also been accused of “not being from around here” because of the way I spoke. Accents can be powerful things; they can be used to judge, and to “other”.) So I am left to wonder: do I still have an accent? Has my Scottish English been softened and blunted into nothingness? That would only be natural. If our environment changes, our accents will too.
Second, Hong Kong parents complain that their child does not speak English with a “native accent”. Yet to me, this is perfectly normal. The child is from Hong Kong, and so sounds like it. They are highly unlikely to speak as though they were from Surrey, Massachusetts or Sydney without having spent a considerable amount of time in those places. The extreme academic expectations of Hong Kong parents are well known, and Hong Kong’s education system, with its emphasis on accuracy and its single-minded focus on passing exams, must shoulder much of the blame. This, however, cannot entirely explain the sense of inferiority. Look again at Singapore, a place equally obsessed with academic perfection, where Singlish nonetheless flourishes as a source of national pride.
I come from Scotland. I know what it is to feel frustrated when people struggle to understand me, when my English does not sound like that heard on television, when it is deemed inferior. What makes it worse, however, is hearing such talk from Hong Kongers, whether about my accent being acceptable or about wanting a “proper” accent. What they mean is that they want Home Counties English, or coastal North American; suburban Australian, at a push. They do not want to sound like someone from Alabama, Dublin or Glasgow. In looking down on their own accents, they also invalidate the ninety-five per cent of the world’s native English speakers who do not sound as though they could land a job reading the news on the BBC World Service.
Hong Kong English is real. It is an official variant of the language, just as Jamaican English, Ghanaian English, Irish English and the world’s myriad other varieties of English are. Each of these places has a unique and complicated relationship with the land that gave it its English, and with the form of the language that was left behind. The same is true of my native Scotland: the original English colony, and the motherland’s closest neighbour. Yet the whys and wherefores of each variant, however important, lie in the past. How Hong Kongers choose to view their unique form of English is the future. I say: embrace it.
How to cite: McKay, Stewart. “From Fife to the Fragrant Harbour: On Learning to Love Hong Kong English.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 5 Nov. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/05/11/hong-kong-english.
Stewart McKay is a British-born writer based in Hong Kong. He graduated from the University of Stirling in 2007 with an honours degree in English Literature and History. After living in Thailand, he moved to Hong Kong in 2012, working as an ESL teacher, tutor, and examiner. An active member of the Hong Kong Writers Circle, he has contributed to several of their anthologies and edited HK24 (2017) and Lost in Transition (2023). His flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Grindstone Literary, Raconteur, Fiction Factory, and Free Flash Fiction, with several pieces shortlisted for literary prizes. His debut novel, The Ballad of Billy Lopez, was a finalist for the 2023 Proverse Prize. McKay’s fiction explores the complexities of human nature—its desires, contradictions, and failings. While he believes literature should interrogate the human condition, he insists it must also entertain. A dark seam of humour often runs through his work, which spans sexuality, aging, speculative futures, and post-apocalyptic nightmares. [All contributions by Stewart McKay.]