One prominent way in which romanized Cantonese figures in the conversations of the girls and their
interlocutors is through the adoption of Cantonese utterance particles at the end of a phrase or sentence.
Previous studies of utterance particles in Cantonese (e.g., Kwok, 1984) and Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Li &
Thompson, 1981) have identified some distinctive features of these linguistic items, which include the
fact that they contain little semantic content and serve primarily to indicate the mood of an utterance and
to express attitudes and emotions. While utterance particles figure massively and pervasively in
conversational Cantonese, formal Cantonese writing or speech contains few of them, except for
conversational or jocular styles of writing that resemble everyday speech