I have been in Hong Kong this last week. Hong Kong English is interesting; but I was not there long enough to gain many insights. I will share just one thing I overheard.
As I was leaving my room one morning, I heard one of the hotel staff knocking on a door and saying what I heard as 'ash keping', and I had to think carefully before I realised it was, of course, 'house keeping'.
I could summarise the phonetics of it: missing [h] at the start, a monophthong vowel instead of [aʊ] in 'house', [ʃ] instead of [s] at the end of 'house', and stress on the second syllable of 'keeping'. (I would need a proper recording to verify all these things; we need to be careful about anecdotal evidence. More about that in my next post.)
But what struck me was this: there's only a few things she could have been saying: 'Good morning', 'Can I clean your room?', etc. And 'house keeping' is one of that small list. However, even in that context, I failed to understand it. It seems that misunderstandings can sometimes be quite surprising.
Finally, I have sometimes suggested that word stress may not be important in maintaining intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), but it occurred to me that it was the shifted stress on 'keeping' that was key. However, is that right? Maybe it was the combination of all the things I have listed above, and maybe stress shift was minor. Alternatively, perhaps stress shift is only important for people like me from the UK or USA, and ELF speakers from most of the rest of the world would not have had such a problem.
