2 Charting Multilingualism: Language Censuses and Language Surveys in Hong Kong John Bacon-Shone and Kingsley Bolton. ABSTRACT The chapter reviews census and language survey data to present a comprehensive, longitudinal survey of the complex pattern of multilingualism and language diversity in Hong Kong over the twentieth century. INTRODUCTION Throughout the 1980s, one basic assumption which underlay many commentaries on the local language situation was that Hong Kong was an overwhelmingly monolingual Cantonese-speaking community and that the extent of individual bilingualism in the community was severely limited (see L9rd and T' sou, 1985; Luke and Richards, 1982; Quirk, 1986). To some extent, the belief that Hong Kong is essentially a monoethnic, monolingual community has persisted into the 1990s. For example, So (1992) expresses this ·widely-held view when he states, almost axiomatically, that "Hong Kong is essentially a monolingual Cantonese-speaking society where English is used in only a restricted number of domains"(p. 79). This chapter sets out to challenge tl)e myth of Hong Kong as a monolingual society by reviewing a wide range of empirical research on multilingualism in the Hong Kong speech community. 1 It does this through a discussion of macrosociolinguistic research drawn chiefly from two sources. First, we collate and evaluate language census data from a number