English is one of two official languages in Hong Kong – the other being Chinese (Cantonese) – and is used in academia, business and the courts, as well as in most government materials.

Major businesses routinely issue important material in both Chinese and English, and all road and government signs are bilingual.

In one co-authored work describing a study conducted of five Hong Kong speakers of English, it was concluded, controversially, as they conceded, that HKE was at most an emergent variety and perhaps no more than a "learner interlanguage".

[4] It has been demonstrated that English spoken in Hong Kong is highly intelligible to listeners from elsewhere,[16] which helps explain why an increasing number of people are happy to be identified as speakers of this variety.

In 2015 University of Hong Kong professor Lisa Lim stated that some of the words, by that year, had declined in usage.