A Chinese street trader negotiates a deal with a customer in Singapore. The Cantonese spoken there and on the Malay peninsula absorbed loan words from other Chinese dialects such as Hokkien-Minnan, and from languages such as Malay. Photo: Getty Images
Opinion
Opinion
Reflections
Why the misplaced superiority of some Hong Kong people, not my ‘adulterated’ Cantonese, was the problem
- Cantonese spoken in Singapore absorbed words from its multilingual, multiethnic population such as that for money, which came from Dutch via Malay and Hokkien
- The writer felt he should stop using the words in Hong Kong, yet came to see them as linguistic markers of roads his forebears took that make him who he is
A Chinese street trader negotiates a deal with a customer in Singapore. The Cantonese spoken there and on the Malay peninsula absorbed loan words from other Chinese dialects such as Hokkien-Minnan, and from languages such as Malay. Photo: Getty Images
