Language
The vast majority (74.5%) of Chinese Filipinos speak either Filipino or English as their first languages. However, many Chinese Filipinos (77%) still retain the ability to understand and speak Hokkien as a second or third language.
The older generation Chinese and recent arrivals from Mainland China or Taiwan largely use Hokkien, the Manila-based younger generation largely use English, and the provincial-based younger generation largely use Filipino or other Philippine regional languages.
For Chinese Mestizos, Spanish was an important commercial language during the turn of the century, but now completely replaced by English.
Read more about this topic: Chinay
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“These are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive ... and impoverished.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)