by John Scott Daly

Daniel Weston read English Language and Literature for his BA at the University of Oxford and obtained his MPhil and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. Prior to taking up a position at HKU, he was employed at Birkbeck, University of London; Portsmouth University; and, latterly, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research interests include bilingual pragmatics (code-switching), World Englishes (specifically English dialect development), and the discourse analysis of gatekeeping encounters.

Hi Danny, I was going to ask you what your first impressions of Hong Kong were, but you’ve actually lived here before, right?

Yes, my family moved here in the late 1990s after the handover, so I was on the cusp of finishing my schooling and then heading off to university, and that’s when I properly moved over. And we were here until 2012, but I kept going back to the UK for my masters and PhD and then would spend the rest of the year in Hong Kong. And my PhD was partly on Hong Kong, so I spent extended periods here dealing with that.

And how was the thesis related to Hong Kong?

I conducted a comparison of English dialect development in Hong Kong and Gibraltar, and part of that looked at code-switching in both of those places, so I spent a lot of time comparing the code-switching styles of Cantonese-English bilinguals with those of English-Cantonese bilinguals who had grown up in the UK. Importantly an extra dimension (because some of that work had already been covered by other scholars) was comparing them with people who were from Hong Kong but had moved over to the UK at say 12, 13, 14, and trying to see if their code-switching styles were substantially different.

That’s interesting. Were they?

There was a big difference between the bilinguals who’d grown up in the UK and the Cantonese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong. And with the third group who had moved from Hong Kong to the UK in their teens, there was some kind of in-between behaviour, but it was difficult to say if that behaviour allowed them to be identified as a distinct group. Some of this third group acted a bit more like British-born Chinese and some more like bilinguals who were raised in Hong Kong. But then there were some speakers whose code-switching patterns did seem to be quite different from those of the other groups.

Your last university was in Norway and I suppose Hong Kong is very different in many ways. What are some things that you think each society could learn from the other?

There’s a big emphasis on living in Scandinavia, and working for work’s sake tends to detract from that, and also from something which is important and state-supported, which is being with your family. There’s also the idea that you should express solidarity with those around you, so if someone wanted very much to prioritise their career and spend all their time at work, that might be regarded somewhat negatively by other people, because eventually it might lead to this sense of competition which, generally speaking, is not approved of in Scandinavia. A text called the Janteloven (Law of Jante) documents this, and those principles (of conforming and not being overly ambitious) keep people on the straight and narrow, so to speak. Hong Kong is very different from that. Some people criticise Hong Kong for being too competitive and that people work too hard and should spend more time with their families, and if you agree with that, then that’s something that Hong Kong could learn from Norway. On the flipside, HKU is a global university with a lot of driven, ambitious staff who produce world-leading research in a large variety of disciplines. Even a quick look at (the admittedly imperfect metric of) world university rankings would show that Norwegian universities don’t really come close to that overall level of excellence, and that might be somewhat related to the different emphasis on work/life balance. So, who you are and what sort of values you have (or just what stage of life you’re at) might influence where you’d want to live.

Staying with the universities, then, while I was an undergrad in the UK, I was a bit surprised by how unpolitical my university campus was. We can’t say that about HKU at the moment – it’s clearly a politicised space. How does that compare with your last university?

When I was in NTNU in Trondheim, there were a number of student organisations that were dedicated to the sort of causes that students are often into, at least in Europe. So, there was a lot of concern over Palestinian rights, refugees and asylum seekers, the environment, and so on. Those political issues were there, but they are in many university campuses. What we see in Hong Kong is a lot more unique to the place and cuts right through society, and I couldn’t say that about those issues in Norway, though there is a general level of concern about them.

I know you’re not teaching here yet, but what challenges or opportunities do you think will come with teaching in such an environment?

I think if we are all doing our jobs correctly then the idea is that you come into the classroom and, if your subject touches on these issues, you approach them from a fair and dispassionate perspective, but one that seeks the truth of the matter. In that sense then it would be difficult for a student to argue with you, if you were encouraging them to address their own ideologies. And what I think academics in the School of English spend a lot of time doing is deconstructing ideologies – it’s an important part of everyone’s work and that work needs to continue. And in that sense, we’re in a place that’s uniquely qualified to address these issues. And that’s a different thing from a staff member coming in and getting on their soapbox and being overtly political. Those are separate things.

Putting these two things together, I’m guessing that, being less competitive and with more emphasis on solidarity, inequality would be lower in Norway than in Hong Kong. And, even though none of the five protesters’ five demands mention inequality, how much do you think it could be a driving force?

I think the problem with ‘inequality’ as a term is how to delimit it. I’m not saying anything new by suggesting that there’s a great deal of unhappiness in Hong Kong as a result of the fact that many people work extremely hard and still never earn enough money to own their own property or to bring up a family, and that this has been a sore that has festered in Hong Kong over a number of years. This kind of unhappiness requires some kind of expression or outlet. And if that outlet is not provided, then that is in part an explanation of some of the difficulties that we see today.

Published on: October 11, 2019 < Back >