Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales 

I will present “Voices that rise, voices that don’t: Gendered uptalk in English and its postcolonial entanglements in Hong Kong.” This talk extends my ongoing research on rising intonation, focusing on how gender, colonial histories, and linguistic ideology shape who is heard as “confident” or “competent” in English.

I will present a paper titled “Who gets to rise? Production and evaluation of uptalk in Hong Kong English and the politics of voice.” This study combines experimental and perceptual approaches to examine how listeners evaluate uptalk differently depending on the speaker’s gender, ethnicity, and social position, linking phonetic detail to broader politics of audibility and legitimacy.

I will be serving as an Invited Early Career Plenary Speaker at ICALLE 2025. My talk, “Comparing variation in two Asian Englishes: Insights from Twitter corpora for language teaching and curriculum reform,” explores morphosyntactic variability in two Asian Englishes, Hong Kong English (HKE) and Philippine English (PhilE). It aims to trace how social and structural factors jointly shape linguistic practice in digitally mediated discourse.

Together with Ivy Chan Pui Yu, Xiaohan Zhang, Ng Chui Yin, and Karina Chung Yan Ching, I will present “Is uptalk gendered in Hong Kong? What High Rising Terminals (HRTs) in Hong Kong English mean.” This collaborative paper examines acoustic and perceptual data to unpack the social meanings attached to uptalk, situating it within Hong Kong’s multilingual soundscape and gendered ideologies of voice.

With Jianing Lizzy Feng, I will also present “Negotiating belonging in a reclassified region: How do Ningbo-Fenghua residents construct geo-ethnolinguistic identities?”This paper explores how speakers from a recently reclassified region in China use language to navigate belonging, authenticity, and change, illustrating how linguistic variation indexes shifting spatial and political identities.

In collaboration with Yue Zhang, I will present our paper “Investing in critical digital literacies: A case study of university students in Hong Kong,” as part of Ron Darvin’s panel “Investment in language learning and teaching: The negotiation of identity, capital, and ideology.” Our study highlights how students’ engagement with digital literacy practices reflects broader tensions between neoliberal education, identity, and linguistic capital.

I will be giving an invited talk (with Roberto Galang and Camilla Cosme) on “Degree of Translanguaging as an Index for Online Consumer Segmentation in Emerging Markets.” This session bridges sociolinguistics and management studies by showing how patterns of language mixing online can reveal consumer identities and market segmentation strategies in multilingual contexts.

I will be speaking about “Analyzing variation and change in Philippine English using a social media corpus.” This talk demonstrates how large-scale social media data can be harnessed to examine linguistic change in real time, focusing on innovative methods for studying Philippine English and how it continues to evolve in digital communication.

I will be an invited speaker at CityU’s English Seminar Series, where I’ll revisit the topic of gendered uptalk in my talk “Revisiting gendered uptalk: Perspectives from Hong Kong English High Rising Terminals.” The presentation explores how rising intonation functions as a resource for stance-taking and identity work in Hong Kong English, questioning common assumptions about femininity and authority in speech.