It is well known that Hong Kong has a floating population consisting mostly of fishermen. These fisherfolk call themselves the ‘boat people’ (shuishang ren literally, ‘people on water’), and upon being asked their native county, they would usually reply, “We're boat people” instead of naming a particular county in the Guangdong Province as is the usual custom. The boat people, of course, are not a homogeneous group as far as speech is concerned. The informants interviewed for the present study came from the Pu Tai Island (a small island to the southeast of Hong Kong). The children went to school on Pu Tai, while the grownups went out to sea to work for their living. About eight years ago the family gave up their boats and settled on land. The speech of this family and that of some friends who were also formerly boat people exhibit certain phonetic characteristics which are interesting departures from Modern Standard Cantonese (hereafter referred to as MSC), the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau.