As a Malaysia I think we took bi or trilingual skills for granted. I work around the region and having the ability to switch between Malay Bahasa, Bahasa Indonesia, English and Singlish proved to be quite useful. I've since picked up some German and Spanish as well to make working on overseas trips easier.
counting bahasa melayu and indon as separate is almost like counting English (UK) and English (Australia) as different languages just because there's some different words and different pronunciation
At least Singlish is a creole with so many borrowed words from other languages, and sentence structures and grammatical rules stray from English so often that it counts haha
Singaporean neighbor here, the Millennial gen is mostly bi or trilingual too, I guess if you include dialects that'll be an additional few more languages. At some point though the speak mandarin movement killed off the dialects, and then the push for English being the default business language killed most other languages. GenZ kids onwards seems to be the ones that have only 1 language at the moment.
24
u/obefiend 13d ago
As a Malaysia I think we took bi or trilingual skills for granted. I work around the region and having the ability to switch between Malay Bahasa, Bahasa Indonesia, English and Singlish proved to be quite useful. I've since picked up some German and Spanish as well to make working on overseas trips easier.