Language
Nearly all ethnic Chinese in Thailand speak only Thai, but an extremely small number (mostly elders) are also conversant in Chinese with varying degrees of fluency. The Teochew dialect of Chinese is used as a commercial lingua franca among a very few elderly Chinese business circles, principally in Chinatown of Bangkok. The proficiency of the Thai language among the ethnic Chinese is attributed to the fact that Thai is a compulsory subject in all schools, while students from a handful of Chinese-medium schools (fewer than 0.1% of all schools) are more proficient in Chinese than those from other schools in general.
Read more about this topic: Thai Chinese
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“One who speaks a foreign language just a little takes more pleasure in it than one who speaks it well. Enjoyment belongs to those who know things halfway.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)