Subject: A history lesson.
Author:
Posted on: 2013-12-12 08:09:00 UTC

Um...for the Chinese part, I don't actually speak Cantonese, though my family and my maternal grandparents do. I never seem to pick it up even when I come from a Cantonese-speaking family, though I can understand it perfectly well. Okay, we don't speak Cantonese all the time. It's more of a mixture of Cantonese, Chinese, and English. With a few Malay, Hokkien and Indian words thrown in as well. So you can see how much we butcher the languages. ;) I can speak fluent Chinese though.

For your first question, I come from Singapore, a British settlement from 1826-1963, so everyone speaks English here (some of the Chinese citizens are even brought up speaking English). At first there was only the Malay fishermen on our island, but Stanford Raffles found it and thought,"Hey! This will make a great port for trading ships!" And so, modern Singapore was founded.

Singapore then became a huge British trading post, where merchants from all over the world came here to trade. So steadily, the Chinese merchants started piling into Singapore, plus the people who escaped China during the Qing dynasty and World War II, until Singapore was mostly populated with the Chinese. Our national language is still Malay though, and even though a lot of us (like me) aren't fluent in Malay, our National Anthem is in Malay.

So...sorry for the history lesson, I didn't actually meant for it to be so long, just a brief flash on my country's history, but I got carried away, so...

Oh, and happy birthday, as I say once again!

~Autumn

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