Global citizenship in the 21st century has entailed one remarkable and widespread phenomenon: multilingualism. As the prefix ‘multi-’ denotes, the world is moving beyond the stage of bilingualism, the state where people speak at most two languages, to the phase in which people speak not only a native language plus a second/foreign language but also some other second/foreign languages. This transition from bilingualism to multilingualism means that people are speaking three or more languages, which enables them to communicate with people from other parts of the world and enhances ‘global’ mobility. How common this multilingual phenomenon is can be illustrated by census statistics in different countries or regions.

Hong Kong, being an international hub in Asia, is of no exception in the globally multilingual community. It has been reported that many Hong Kong people are multilingual (a point to return to later in this chapter). The ability of many Hong Kong people to speak at least three languages may be closely related to the multilingual environment of the city. In Hong Kong, English and Chinese are the two official languages which are used in different formal contexts, such as government, law and education. Chinese in turn embraces Standard Written Chinese and Cantonese. Standard Written Chinese is used in written communication, and Cantonese, a variety of Chinese, serves as the vernacular language. This variety of Chinese does share some similarities with the standard Chinese variety (i.e. the variety used as the national language of China, which is commonly known as Putonghua), especially in the realm of lexis and syntax, but the two varieties differ quite a lot in phonology. Besides Cantonese, some other Chinese dialects (e.g. Shanghainese, Chiu Chow and Hakkanese) are also commonly spoken among the immigrants from mainland China. It is in this multilingual context that the project reported in this book was conducted on a group of local multilinguals with knowledge of Cantonese, English and French.