Unveiling the Humour: Exploring Hong Kong Cantonese Jokes through ‘Chronotopic Consciousness’

Gumperz and Hymes (1972/1986) have proposed the concept of “linguistic repertoire” to refer to “the totality of linguistic resources” available to stable speech communities, of which the sharedness can guarantee smooth communications among their members. In the context of superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007), language use is characterised by complex forms of hybridity due to transnational mobility and digital advancement. By highlighting the biographical dimension of language learning processes, Blommaert and Backus (2013) maintain that “linguistic repertoire” is indeed highly individualised and complex. While linguistic repertoire in both collective and individual sense are justified, I use a chronotopic-scalar approach (Karimzad, 2021) to reconcile the two which is more apt in capturing both the shared and unshared repertoires of individuals in the affordance where access to information can be transnational and cross-cultural.

In this paper, I use a scene of a viral Hong Kong advertisement on social media to illustrate that a shared repertoire is not limited to normative language use but can also be the resources for linguistic creativity when combined with the use of highly heteroglossic semiotic/linguistic repertoire. Specifically, the scene involves not only normative Cantonese but also a local mock variety and Japanese linguistic elements which are deeply contextualised linguistic choices. By using a chronotopic-scalar approach as the analytical tool (Karimzad, 2021; see also Karimzad & Catedral 2021, 2022), I add to the notion of linguistic repertoire by taking into account the “chronotopic consciousness” which can bridge the overlap between the individualised and shared repertoire among Hong Kong netizens, while also accounting for the varying degrees of understanding the heteroglossic jokes across participants at different scales.