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.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Filipino
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)