Leading Language Research in the GBA to the International Arena—Dr Cong Wang Receives Project Funding of over HK$1.95 Million and €225864 from the ANR/RGC JRS

Dr Cong Wang, Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Language Studies of The Education University of Hong Kong, has received funding of HK$ 1,951,788 and €225864.4 from The French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme (JRS) to launch a three-year project (2023-2026) entitled “Language Contact and Areal Diffusion of Sinitic Languages in the Greater Bay Area”.

This joint project is collaborated by the Hong Kong Team and the French Team led by Dr Cong Wang (The Education University of Hong Kong) and Dr Chong Qi (Université Paris Cité). Research team members are outstanding scholars from different universities in Hong Kong, mainland China, and France. The project aims to examine language contact and language endangerment through a large-scale typological study of languages in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) based on Cantonese, Tankas, and Southern Pinghua to uncover the relationship between Cantonese and other Sinitic languages, and the typological features of languages in the GBA.

This project introduces the GBA languages to the world through investigating first-hand linguistic data of Tankas and Southern Pinghua, the two rarely studied languages, providing an insight into the mechanisms of language contact and language changes as well as a comprehensive understanding of language divergence and convergence in this particular region of Mainland Southeast Asia. This project likewise highlights the critical role of Cantonese in the GBA languages and will boost the research of Sinitic languages. In studying language origins and gene-related languages in the GBA, this project will also contribute significantly to humankind’s evolution by providing rich data of Tankas and Southern Pinghua for the communities.

In Hong Kong, this joint project competed with vast numbers of projects from all disciplines and is one of the only two projects that finally won funding in 2022.  In France, it stood out from thousands of projects from 12 countries and regions. It is the second Hong Kong-France collaborated project that Dr Wang has obtained. The first one was the two-year PROCORE-France/Hong Kong JRS entitled “Inclusive and Exclusive: Language Contact Between Sinitic Languages and Altaic Languages” (2021-2023), led by Dr Wang and Prof Dan Xu-song (Member of Academia Europaea) from Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale (CRLAO). This two-year project will host an international conference at The Education University of Hong Kong in March 2023.