More than 10 years ago, if you saw a Chinese stranger on the street, it was safe to speak to him/her in Hakka coz 99.999999% of them would understand Hakka. Now is very different, we got Hokkien, Cantonis, Teochaw… people in Sabah and many of them can’t speak Hakka.
Therefore, all the Sabah Chinese Hakka are forced to speak in Chinese (Mandarin). To study how well the transition taking place, I observe the way the Sabah Chineses talk among themselves. Below is part of the conversation I recorded in coffee shop. See if it sounds familiar to you. Sorry ah, if you can’t read Chinese.
Lesson: For non-Chinese in Sabah, it doesn’t help even if you learn Chinese. You still can’t understand what they say.
haha yeah… have to agree… sabahans mandarin and cantonese have their own slang.
got a little mixture with hakka word….
ya… actually this “localised language problem” happens to any language any country any region. if we speak bahasa baku, we will sound too formal n serious. but we need to be able to tell which word is slang, so we won’t become a laughing bag when we write / speak to foreginers…
ha ha ha! so funny… it reminds me how i speak mandarin with rojak english, malay and kadazan with most of my sino friends…
p.s: Fa Ge sounds nicer than fu**ker… Wahhahaha…
sumandak, impressive.. i assume you know hakka as well, coz u need 2 know both mandarin n hakka 2 find this funny 🙂
Wow! This post is great!
We need more of this type of original Sabahan post!
Good to see 🙂
borneofamer, tq. yr blog is very well written. really glad 2 c more online content abt sabah.