During the British colonial era, English was the sole official language until 1974. Today, the Basic Law of Hong Kong states that English and Cantonese are the two official languages of Hong Kong. All roads and government signs are bilingual, and both languages are used in academia, business and the courts, as well as in most government materials today.

According to the 2021 Hong Kong census, 93.7% of the population aged 5 or above could speak Cantonese, 58.7% could speak English, and 54.2% could speak Mandarin; in terms of usual spoken language, 88.2% of the population aged 5 and over spoke Cantonese, 4.6% spoke English and 2.3% spoke Mandarin.

Official languages

English was the sole official language of Hong Kong from 1883 to 1974. Only after demonstrations and petitions from Hong Kong people demanding equal status for Chinese did the language become official in Hong Kong from 1974 onward. Annex I of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration provided that English may be used in addition to Chinese for official purposes in the future Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. In March 1987, the Official Languages Ordinance was amended to require all new legislation to be enacted bilingually in both English and Chinese. In 1990, the Hong Kong Basic Law affirmed English's co-official language status with Chinese after the 1997 handover. No variety of Chinese has been specified to be official in Hong Kong, though it is usually understood to be spoken Cantonese and written vernacular Chinese.

Chinese languages As a result of immigration into Hong Kong from Guangdong, Cantonese is the dominant Chinese variant spoken in the territory with smaller numbers of speakers of other dialects. There are also numerous Chinese languages spoken by the native peoples of the New Territories, many of which are mutually unintelligible.

Written Chinese

The written language used in official and formal settings is written vernacular Chinese in Traditional Chinese characters. The local name for written Chinese is (), in contrast to (), i.e. Cantonese. This form of written Chinese must be distinguished from written Cantonese on the one hand and from Putonghua, the standard language/national variety of Mainland China, on the other. Thus it has also been called Hong Kong-style Chinese () to distinguish it from Putonghua. Although texts in Hong Kong-style Chinese are read in Cantonese phonology, its grammar and lexicon are largely derived from the Mandarin-based Modern Standard Chinese. Consequently, people proficient in other varieties of Standard Chinese, like Beijing Mandarin or Taiwanese Mandarin, are able to understand it at least in writing.

There is also a written language based on the vocabulary and grammar of spoken Cantonese known as written Cantonese. Although the implies an absence of support for written Cantonese, it has gained popularity in news media where entertainment and local news are related. Written Cantonese is unintelligible to non-Cantonese speakers and is considered nonstandard by some educators despite its widespread usage in Hong Kong. Some have also credited written Cantonese for solving the challenges that standard written Chinese had faced in popular culture. As a written language, Cantonese became more popular with the boom of the Cantonese-language Hong Kong entertainment industry in the 1980s. Movie subtitles, magazines, popular literature, and comics have been published in written Cantonese. The publication of the Government Common Character Set (GCCS) in 1995 and the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) in 1999 by the Information Technology Services Department further helped with standardizing the Chinese character set used for writing Cantonese.

Simplified Chinese is seen in some posters, leaflets, flyers and signs in the tourist areas, but hold limited-to-no legal authority.

Yue

The primary vernacular language of Hong Kong is standard Cantonese, spoken by 88.9% of the population. It is used in all areas of daily life, government, and administration. A few closely related dialects to standard Cantonese continue to be spoken in Hong Kong. Most notable is the Weitou dialect (圍頭話), which is mostly spoken by the older generation living in walled villages in New Territories. Additionally, the Tanka people () from the fishing villages on outlying islands speak their own variant of Cantonese. However, this dialect is now largely limited to those middle aged and above. Taishanese came from migrants. The language can still be found in some areas in Hong Kong where migrants concentrated, such as Sai Wan.

Mandarin When Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom, Mandarin Chinese was not widely used in Hong Kong. With the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, educational materials were imported into the then British colony and schools teaching Modern Standard Chinese, the official language of the Republic, were established there as well. Yet, due to the British colonial government favouring English over Chinese for most of its rule, there was not much official effort to further regulate the language.

Since the 1997 handover, the huge increase in inbound tourism from the mainland has led to much more widespread use of Mandarin, particularly in tourism-related commerce, though little impact has been seen in locally based commerce or public services.

In addition, the large number of soeng1 fei1 () children (children born in Hong Kong whose parents are both from the Mainland) has increased the number of Mandarin-speaking people, particularly in districts close to the border, such that Mandarin-speaking children make up large proportions or even the majority of primary-school students in those districts, causing the beginnings of a language shift in those areas.

Hakka Hakka is indigenous to many villages in the New Territories and within Hakka communities in Hong Kong. Nowadays, outside these rural villages and older populations, younger Hakka Chinese populations communicate primarily in Cantonese.http://www.hkilang.org (in Chinese Traditional)http://podcast.rthk.hk/podcast/item_epi.php?pid=315&lang=zh-CN&id=16160 RTHK《漫遊百科 - Ep. 17》(in Cantonese)

Min Hokkien (especially Quanzhou Hokkien), Teochew, and Haklau are the Southern Min varieties commonly found in Hong Kong. However, their usage is largely limited to the migrant families from the around the 20th century or so, especially the cold war era after the communist takeover of China in 1949, to the 21st century, such as middle aged descendants of immigrants from native Chinese regions of these variants, specifically for Haklau speakers from Swabue, Teochew speakers from the Teoswa region (such as Chaozhou, Chaoyang, etc.) of Southeast Guangdong, and Hokkien speakers from Southern Fujian (such as Quanzhou, Xiamen, Zhangzhou) and cold war-era returnee migrants from Southeast Asia, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, etc. since many of them migrated out to the aforementioned Southeast Asian countries during the late 20th century before the Handover of Hong Kong but some also remained or came back to Hong Kong, especially around North Point and nearby areas.

Wu Shanghainese, or Wu Chinese in general, was commonly spoken by migrants who escaped Shanghai after the communist takeover of China in 1949. Their descendants assimilated into mainstream Cantonese-speaking society. However there is still a sizeable immigrant community after the reform and opening up in 1978, and about 1.1% of the population speaks Shanghainese according to a 2016 census.

English

English is a major working language in Hong Kong, and is widely used in commercial activities and legal matters. Although the sovereignty of Hong Kong was transferred to the PRC by the United Kingdom in 1997, English remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong as enshrined in the Basic Law.

Code-switching between Cantonese and English

Many Hong Kong people use both Cantonese and English, or "code-switch", in the same sentence when speaking. For example, " make sense!" ("Wow, it does not make sense!"). The code-switching can freely mix English words and Chinese grammar, for instance " un understand?" ("Do you understand?") which follows the Chinese grammar syntax 'verb - not - verb' to ask "Do you (verb)?".

Some code-switched words are used so often that they have become loanwords in Cantonese,Chan, Mimi and Helen Kwok (1982). A Study of Lexical Borrowing from English in Hong Kong Cantonese. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong. for example, "like", pronounced "lai-kee" /laːi55kʰi35/. "Partner", pronounced "pat-la" /pʰaːt̚55laː21/. "File", pronounced "fai-lo" /faːi55lou35/. "Number", pronounced "lum-ba" /lɐm55pa35/. "Case", pronounced "kei-see" /kʰei55si35/.

Other spoken languages

In addition, immigrants and expatriates from the West and other Asian countries have contributed much to Hong Kong's linguistic and demographic diversity. The geographical element of this diversity can be seen in the Hong Kong language maps, which shows oral languages from the 2011 Census, and oral and written languages from the 2016 Census. Statistics for the 27 self-reported spoken languages/dialects reported in the 2011 Census, can be found in the report: Language Use, Proficiency and Attitudes in Hong Kong and for the spoken and written languages in the 2016 By-Census in the report: The Contribution of Minority Languages and Dialects to Hong Kong’s Linguistic Landscape.

South Asian languages

In 2006, there were at least 44,744 persons of South Asian descent living in Hong Kong. Signboards written in Hindi or Urdu can be seen, and conversation in South Asian languages including Nepali, Sindhi and Punjabi, as well as Urdu, Hindi and Tamil can be heard.

Hong Kong has two Nepalese newspapers, The Everest and the Sunrise Weekly Hong Kong. In 2004, the Home Affairs Bureau and Metro Plus AM 1044 jointly launched radio shows Hong Kong-Pak Tonight in Urdu and Hamro Sagarmatha in Nepalese.

The history of Indians in Hong Kong can be traced back to the early days of British Hong Kong. When the Union flag of the United Kingdom was hoisted on 26 January 1841, there were around 2,700 Indian troops that participated, and they played an important role in the development of Hong Kong in the early days. The most prominent contributions were the founding of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and the Star Ferry.

Although nearly all of the Indian people who live in Hong Kong speak and write Indian English, some have maintained the usage of Hindi as a second language.

Japanese

There are over 25,000 Japanese people in Hong Kong, so it is not uncommon to hear Japanese conversations. More than 10,000 people in Hong Kong had taken the JLPT in 2005."Number of Applicants and Examines by Test Site of the JLPT 2005" , The Japan Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-02-25. Hong Kong-based R by R Production produces a television travel show set in Japan, which, as of April 2016, is broadcast on ViuTV. However, the language is often misused."", R by R Production. Retrieved on 2007-02-25. (in Japanese)

Japanese culture, especially popular culture, has been popular in Hong Kong for decades. Hong Kong people occasionally replace Chinese characters with Japanese kanji. In addition, the Companies Registry also permits the hiragana ‘no’ in Chinese business names that are registered in Hong Kong."Business" Required to be Registered and Application for Business Registration: Business Name , Inland Revenue Department The hiragana の is usually used in place of the Chinese character () and is read as such in Hong Kong. In fact, Aji Ichiban has adopted の in their company name ().