Abstract：This article discusses three aspects of Hong Kong’s language life: three forms of Chinese, community words, and Chinese character forms. First, Hong Kong is a community composed of multilingual people, and the use of multilingual codes is the reality of Hong Kong’s language life. There are three forms of Hong Kong Chinese in writing: General Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, and Cantonese Chinese. The multilingual phenomenon in Hong Kong is caused by a variety of sociopolitical factors such as language distance, language hierarchy, character availability, governance modality, community positioning, cluster effect, historical habits, and psychological recognition. Second, community words are categorized from the perspective of regional society or the relationship between words and society and should be understood from the “community-specific” perspective. Community words break through the limitations of dialect words and foreign words and the boundaries between sociolinguistics and noumental linguistics. Around the world, under the national standard language, there may be community words in every multi-dialect community. Third, Hong Kong has experimented on the coexistence of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. In the atmosphere of traditional characters, new developments can be expected in the unification of the traditional and simplified characters. The language life in Hong Kong has similar features with other Chinese-speaking communities, thus shall be accorded universal significance.
