NOTES
1. All names are pseudonyms.
2. Quotations from recorded interviews are translations from Cantonese. Italics represent the interviewee's
code-switching to English.
3. I use the term "chatmate" for the chat room participants whom Yu Qing and Tsu Ying considered their friends. A related term "chatter," which I adopted from the girls, is used by them to refer to any chat room participant in general.
4. Both girls had installed Chinese software on their computers and used it to browse Chinese language Web sites and read newspapers online. Hence, their choice of not activating the Chinese software or not paying attention to Chinese characters in the chat room is additional evidence that they were disaffiliating with the group of chat room participants who wrote solely in Chinese.
5. As one reviewer of this article pointed out, the subjects' avoidance of using Chinese characters in chats could be partially due to the fact that inputting Chinese characters in chats is more troublesome, especially when the subjects were mostly in an English context within the chat environment. However, the use of romanization instead of Chinese characters further shows that the girls were adopting a convention for code-switching that is shared by ethnic Chinese around the world who comprehend oral but not written Cantonese. In this case, code-switching through romanization allowed the girls to develop a different social network than they would have by writing in Chinese characters.
6. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for calling my attention to the use of the particle "ar" as a softener or down-toner. See also Matthews & Yip (1994) and Kwok (1984) for discussion on the pervasive use of "ar" as a neutral softener in conversational Cantonese.
7. I have observed a few other instances of confusion over the romanization of homophonous Cantonese words that sound similar but look different in writing. As in regular Cantonese speech, the conversational context is crucial in determining the meaning of the romanized words in the code-switching dialogues of the chat room. Sometimes the conversational participants would have to negotiate the meaning of their romanization by paraphrasing it in English or other Cantonese words.
8. Discourses on gender and sexuality were prominent in the chat room, and were mostly carried out through the genre of adolescent flirtation. These discursive elements are analyzed in Lam (2003).