Since Gibbons’ (1979; 1987) pioneering works, there has been substantial interest
in Cantonese–English code-switching in the Hong Kong context, illustrated not only in
monographs and articles by linguists and scholars (e.g. Li 2000) but also in dissertations
and theses (e.g. Chan 2003; Fung 2003). In this literature, a variety of factors have been
proposed as to why Hong Kong bilinguals resort to code-switching, but one factor stands
out as particularly important.