4 ms·
Bangkok more diverse than Singapore? That doesn't really ring true. That and the fact that Singaporean students are required to study their mother language in
by saryant 10y ago
Bangkok more diverse than Singapore? That doesn't really ring true.
That and the fact that Singaporean students are required to study their mother language in addition to English.
Also—aren't most Chinese-Singaporeans of Hokkien or Cantonese ancestry? Their forbears likely didn't speak Mandarin. For that matter, Hokkien was the dominant Chinese dialect in Singapore until relatively recently.
- abjwam 10y agoI don't know what is the obsession of westerners with Cantonese. There are several chinese languages spoken in Singapore. The most widely spoken is Hokkien (~50% in singapore) followed by the Teochew language (~25% of chinese in singapore). Cantonese is spoken by much fewer people in Singapore as well as in mainland China.
- princeb 10y agoin the US the chinatowns (used to be) largely populated by toisanese emigrants. it is now mostly HK/China prestige yue and mandarin speakers, but the traditional image of the american Chinatown is seiyap.
- smallnamespace 10y agoIt's due to the fact that Cantonese is the main language that Westerners will encounter if they ever visit their local Chinatown. Singapore is actually unusual compared to other diaspora communities in that most of the emigrants were from Fujian province, not Canton.
- abjwam 10y agoDon't think that's true. I'm in southeast asia and the largest chinese language groups in the following countries are: Singapore: Hokkien Indonesia: Teochew Philippines: Hokkien Malaysia: Hokkien (although cantonese popular there) Thailand: Teochew Teochew and Hokkien are actually part of the min-nan dialect group which also includes Taiwanese.
- smallnamespace 10y agoThat's fair, but anything outside of SE Asia is predominantly Cantonese, hence why Westerners are familiar with it. There's also the fact that the HK film industry was fairly dominant for a couple of decades--if a Westerner saw a Chinese-language film before the 90s, it almost certainly had Cantonese in it.
- contingencies 10y agoBangkok more diverse than Singapore? That doesn't really ring true. It does, when you consider that there are real communities of diverse groups, each of whom have restaurants. Just last visit (one week, about a week ago) I personally ate at authentic Tamil muslim, Sikh (temple), Karnataka, Burmese, Korean, Lebanese, Yemeni, Italian, French, Sichuan, Thai Muslim, Thai and Thai vegetarian restaurants. That doesn't touch on Nepali, Yunnanese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese, Indonesian, Philippino, African, or other Chinese or western cuisine. For sure there are many more Middle Eastern places too, Russian and eastern European, plenty of Australian, US and Canadian places, as well as South American, etc. I've eaten Iranian before there too. Nor does it touch on the significant local cuisine of the city (some of which is Chinese-derived), or specific regional cuisine from other parts of Thailand, virtually all of which can be found in Bangkok and virtually none of which can be found intact in Singapore.