The girls identified themselves as code-mixers and used different amounts of English and romanized
Cantonese depending on who they were talking to and the topic of conversation. At the same instant, they
could be using all English with one interlocutor and a lot of romanization with another. This became
apparent to me when I was observing the girls dialoguing with multiple chatters at the same time and
using more English with one and more romanization with another. But all of their friends could
understand romanized Cantonese, even for those who grew up in North America or Europe. A key
distinguishing characteristic of their friendship group, then, was the use and acceptance of code-switching
between English and romanized Cantonese. In the next section, I discuss how Yu Qing and Tsu Ying
negotiate their relationships with other chat room participants as bilingualspeakers of English using
different forms of code-switching into romanized Cantonese.5