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A Malaysian man speaking Mandarin with a Malaysian accent. The phonology of Malaysian Mandarin is more closely aligned with the Mandarin accents of Southern China than with the Beijing standard pronunciation. This is a consequence of the influence of other Sinitic varieties, including Cantonese and Hokkien [1]
The government provides schooling at the primary level in each of the three major languages, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. Within Malay and Tamil there are a number of dialectal differences. [4] There are a number of Chinese languages native to the ethnic Han Chinese who originated from Southern China, which include Yue, Min and Hakka Chinese.
Oxford Dictionary has 273,000 headwords; 171,476 of them being in current use, 47,156 being obsolete words and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. The dictionary contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives, and 169,000 phrases and combinations, making a total of over 600,000 word-forms. [41] [42]
Malay as spoken in Malaysia (Bahasa Melayu) and Singapore, meanwhile, have more borrowings from English. [1] There are some words in Malay which are spelled exactly the same as the loan language, e.g. in English – museum (Indonesian), hospital (Malaysian), format, hotel, transit etc.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Classical Malay, Late Modern Malay and Modern Malay. Old Malay is believed to be the actual ancestor of Classical Malay. [16] Old Malay was influenced by Sanskrit, the classical language of India. Sanskrit loan words can be found in Old ...
Note: The change from final -l in Standard Malay to -i is a general feature of Penang Malay, the local variety from which Penang Hokkien borrows. This phonological change can be seen in other loanwords from Penang Malay, e.g. sām-bai 參峇 (sambal). ou [ou] 大佬 tāi-lôu: Used in Cantonese and Teochew loanwords.
At secondary level, some students opt for Chinese Independent High Schools, instead of national public schools, which use Malay (officially referred to as the Malaysian language (Bahasa Malaysia)) as the medium of instruction. It is also widely taught as a third language alongside English and Mandarin in English Medium international schools.
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.