Hong Kong’s colonial and linguistic history has generated a signification amount of research, with recent research centered around key political moments including the lead up to the 1997 return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) rule, the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and the 2019–2020 protests against the introduction of the Anti‑Extradition Law Amendment Bill. This research has often focused on attitudes towards and use of Hong Kong’s three official languages as identity markers against the changing and often divisive political landscape: Cantonese, the local and most widely spoken language of Hong Kong; English, a formerly colonial and now global language tied to education and occupational success; and Mandarin Chinese, the national language of the PRC that became an official language after the return of Hong Kong to PRC rule in 1997. Hong Kong English (HKE), the local and Cantonese‑influenced variety of English that has emerged in Hong Kong in part due to colonization by the British, has also been widely studied, particularly within Kachru’s Three Circles Model (Reference Kachru1988) and Schneider’s (Reference Schneider2007) Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes.

In Cultural Conceptualizations of the SELF in Hong Kong English, Denise Latić offers another dimension in the examinations of identity and the languages of Hong Kong by drawing on the field of Cultural Linguistics, building on the work of Palmer (Reference Palmer1996) and Sharifan (Reference Sharifian2011, Reference Sharifian2017), among others, to examine the way in which these languages embody the cultural conceptual of self in Hong Kong. Cultural Linguistics is an emerging interdisciplinary field that examines the relationship between language, culture and cognition, with particular attention to cultural conceptualizations and worldviews. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, psychology, anthropology and complexity science, Cultural Linguistics explores how language both reflects and shapes cultural conceptualizations, schemas and metaphors. Using survey and interview data collected in 2018, several years after the Umbrella Movement, alongside social media corpora produced during the 2019–2020 protests, Latić examines how Hong Kong’s distinctive cultural identity is understood, articulated and contested.

A central concern of the book is the role of language in shaping and expressing Hong Kong identity. It considers the relationship among Hong Kong Cantonese, Hong Kong English and Mandarin Chinese, and asks how these languages contribute to competing and overlapping understandings of the Hong Kong self. At its heart, the book is about Hong Kong’s unique cultural identity and the question of how that identity is maintained within the political framework of the PRC. It is especially concerned with perceptions of what makes Hong Kong culturally distinctive during a period of significant political change between 2018 and 2020.

The book is organized into six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the study and outlines its theoretical foundation in Cultural Linguistics, with particular attention to the notion of cultural conceptualizations as the book’s analytical framework. Chapter 2 offers a historical overview of Hong Kong, focusing on its political history and the cultural concepts most relevant to the study, including spirituality, with a focus on ancestor worship, and family and filial piety. Chapter 3 describes the methodology, which includes interviews, surveys and protest‑related data from 2019–2020. Chapter 4 presents the findings in the order in which the data were collected: semi‑structured ethnographic interviews and focus group discussions, survey responses and social media corpora. Chapter 5 brings these findings together through the proposed ‘cultural model of the self’, using the three data sets to develop an account of the collective self. Chapter 6 concludes the book with a brief summary of its main arguments and contributions. The book is impressively detailed and richly illustrated, drawing on a wide range of studies from different contexts to clarify its key concepts and demonstrate their broader relevance.

The analysis shows how Cantonese, English, Hong Kong English and Mandarin are each associated with distinct dimensions of Hong Kong identity. Cantonese is linked to localism and to being a Hongkonger, while English is associated with education and prestige. Participants distinguish Hong Kong English from English more broadly, often describing it as a blend of Chinese and English, though this discussion would have benefited from closer engagement with existing linguistic research on Hong Kong English. Mandarin, by contrast, is frequently positioned as a threat to Cantonese and to Hong Kong culture. Together, these findings underscore Hong Kong’s hybrid, bilingual and multicultural character, shaped by its colonial history and by continuing concerns over the possible loss of cultural identity. The book also examines how culture and spirituality contribute to conceptualizations of the Hongkonger self by exploring ancestor worship and filial piety as central spiritual and cultural schemas that shape the self. Latić emphasizes that spirituality in Hong Kong is not limited to formal religious affiliation but is deeply embedded in cultural practices and traditions including like burning paper offerings or observing the Ghost Festival; spirituality, in this sense, is reconceptualized as a cultural tradition rather than a religious belief and used to distinguish Hongkongers from both Westerners and mainland Chinese.

One of the unique contributions of the book is that it brings Cultural Linguistics and World Englishes into dialogue, arguing that Cultural Linguistics offers a systematic way to examine how culture shapes the acculturation of World Englishes and contributes to a speech community’s cultural cognition. This perspective usefully extends existing approaches to World Englishes by foregrounding the cultural dimensions of language use. The book argues that recent work on World Englishes has not always treated culture as a central analytical concern, a gap that is especially significant for research on Asian Englishes, given the region’s rapidly expanding populations of English users.

By applying Cultural Linguistics into the World Englishes framework, the book also positions language not simply as a communicative resource, but as a key site through which cultural identity and collective self‑understanding are produced. This adds a cognitive dimension to the study of Hong Kong English and opens productive avenues for cross‑disciplinary analysis. Drawing on scholarship on Hong Kong, English in Hong Kong, cultural cognition and the self, it offers a thoughtful and wide‑ranging account of Hong Kong cultural identity. Its strongest contribution lies in its cultural approach to language: rather than treating culture as something inferred from language, it foregrounds cultural conceptualizations as the framework through which language, identity and belonging are understood. This book will therefore appeal to readers interested in the intersections of cognition, language and culture, particularly researchers and students in Cultural Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, World Englishes, linguistic anthropology, critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, the social sciences and political science.

However, the book’s stated aim of situating its findings within both Cultural Linguistics and World Englishes is not fully realized. While the Cultural Linguistics framework is developed in detail, the engagement with World Englishes scholarship remains comparatively limited.

The book also foregrounds an emic perspective on the self as expressed through Hong Kong English, but the linguistic evidence presented in support of this claim is relatively limited. The analysis would have been strengthened by more sustained engagement with World Englishes research, as well as with existing linguistic work on Hong Kong English, Cantonese, English and Mandarin in Hong Kong, particularly given that the findings of the analysis presented in the book echo those of previous research; more explicit connection of the book’s findings with linguistic research on language in Hong Kong would strengthen both the analysis and the proposed framework for incorporating a fuller cultural dimension into World Englishes research. These connections are noted, but they are not developed as fully in the literature review or integrated as consistently into the analysis as they might have been. The book is also somewhat uneven in structure. Chapters 1 and 2 are longer and more detailed, while the methodology in Chapter 3 and the discussion and interpretation in Chapter 5 and conclusions in Chapter 6 are comparatively brief and would benefit from further elaboration.

Although language, and Hong Kong English in particular, is central to the book’s framing, the discussion is more fully developed around culture and the self than around language and linguistic research. In sum, while the book engages extensively with research on Hong Kong, culture and conceptualizations of the self, its engagement with linguistic scholarship is comparatively limited. This is a weakness, given that language is presented as integral to the cultural construction of the Hong Kong self.

Overall, however, the book makes a valuable contribution to the study of identity, culture and language in Hong Kong. It is likely to shape future work on Hong Kong English by offering a framework for integrating deeper cultural analysis into a field that has largely approached language in Hong Kong from a linguistic perspective.