The two official languages are English and Cantonese. The most commonly used language is Cantonese as 95% of the population are Chinese. English is the language of business and remain as such, even after the hand over from the British to the Chinese in 1997.
Most people involved in any sort of business that a visitor would interact with will speak English. Most young people speak it and shop and people involved in the service industry will understand it.
Other Chinese dialects are spoken such as Mandarin, Shanghainese and chiu-chow are also spoken by some people.

Being a truly international city most hotels will have employees with experience in other languages such as French, German, madarin and Japanese. These hotels can often offer translation services as well.

A colour coded system ahs been introduced to make it easier for visitor to know what languages are spoken in different tourist centres such as gift and information centres. A red stripe indicates that the wearer speaks Japanese, a green stripe that they speak mandarin, purple, indicates German and Blue means French is spoken by the wearer.

The policemen wearing red tags under their shoulder number indicates they are an English speaker.