Language
Most Sino-Mauritian youth are at least trilingual: they use Mauritian Creole and French orally, while English—the language of administration and education—remains primarily a written language. In the 1990 census, roughly one-third of Sino-Mauritians stated Mauritian Creole as both their ancestral language and currently spoken language. The other two-thirds indicated some form of Chinese as their ancestral language although only fewer than one-quarter of census respondents who identified Chinese as their ancestral language also indicated it as the language spoken in the home. Few Sino-Mauritian youth speak Chinese; those who do use it primarily for communication with elderly relatives, especially those who did not attend school and thus had little exposure to English or French. None use it to communicate with their siblings or cousins. Among those members of the community who do continue to speak Hakka, wide divergence with Meixian Hakka has developed in terms of vocabulary and phonology.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)