Chinese in Samoa - Language

Language

The majority of the Chinese coolies came from the Guangdong province and generally spoke Cantonese or Hakka as their primary language. However, their descendants in Samoa have adopted Samoan and English as their mother tongues, while Cantonese is still reportedly spoken by a few elderly people.

Read more about this topic:  Chinese In Samoa

Famous quotes containing the word language:

    Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artis tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
    Robert Menzies (1894–1978)

    Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
    Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

    One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
    John Berger (b. 1926)