IMPLEMENTATION OF LANGUAGE EDUCATIONAL POLICY IN THE SOCIO-HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE HONG KONG SOCIETY DEVELOPMENT

The article's relevance is determined by the need to examine the background of and rationale for the government's aim of solving the problems of a multilingual society and identifying the pecu-liar features of implementing language educational policy and defining its influence on the language situation as a whole. The purpose of this article is to identify the specifics of the formation and de-velopment of the language policy of trilingualism in Hong Kong and its impact on the practice of using language in education. Based on the analytical reviews and reports, the authors study the pre-history and background for bilingualism and trilingualism in Hong Kong and consider the govern-ment's initiatives concerning language use in education. The article has also reviewed the current policy and practice of multilingualism in the field of education. The study draws a distinction be-tween “language policy” and “language planning” and shows how these processes proceeded in the society of Hong Kong at different stages of its development. The dinamics of the changing lan-guage situation is demonstrated, special attention is given to the reasons for spreading languages (English and Putonghua) in society. The method of system analysis and the analytical method made it possible to identify the main features of the language policy in Hong Kong, monitor the imple-mentation of government plans in the field of language policy, highlight the problems in this area, and generalise the results of implementing the language educational policy in Hong Kong at differ-ent stages of the society development.