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:
“Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus “theoretically,” is to use language in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
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“It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”
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