I should probably also add that myself, a english speaking Malaysian Chinese would probably have to use english or malay with a random group of penang people si

I should probably also add that myself, a english speaking Malaysian Chinese would probably have to use english or malay with a random group of penang people since I can't speak mandarin - so from a purely practical point of view, given Malaysia and Singapore are a mishmash of southern dialects, we again come back to English Mandarin Malay Then one of the various major dialects - and even then once you start moving around the country the Penang hokkien speaker in KL has to either switch to english or mandarin and the KL cantonese speaker in penang has to switch to mandarin and english and at the end of the day, with both the PRC and ROC using Mandarin as the common tongue, and the same situation existing for any other sinophere country bar Hong Kong...there we go. If you go overseas and meet a random other Chinese person, your heuristics of common language are again going to skew English or Mandarin then Cantonese then only one of the others so...