What cities in Asia has English as their default language? (life, cost)
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Certainly there are a lot of cities in Asia where there is signage in English and where there are a lot of people who can speak English as a second language as well as sizable populations of natives or foreigners who speak English at home. However, what countries actually have English as the default day-to-day language of the city in general? I don't just mean that there's a good chance you can easily find someone in the city to help you out in English as I found in Manila--I mean this as in English is essentially how most day-to-day things in public life are conducted.
The only one I am very sure of is Singapore. I've thought about Hong Kong, but the default language there is very much Cantonese. Perhaps Kuala Lumpur or perhaps some very heterogeneous cities in India where there are many different language speaking groups that ultimately must default to English in order to get around?
Filipinos may speak good English better than Singaporeans but they still speak the local dialects as their default language
In my experience, the average Singaporean may speak with their trademark accent, but they are generally a lot more fluid and proficient overall when it comes to speaking English than Filipinos and I mean by a very large extent. However, my experiences in the Philippines have been Metro Manila and some parts just outside of that though not resort areas where I'm sure English proficiency would be fairly high as it is in many resort areas. Perhaps Metro Manila is comparatively much less comfortable with English compared to the rest of the Philippines, but that would strike me as rather odd.
Anyhow, I definitely would not consider Manila to be a city where English is anywhere close to default though there was a good deal of people who were able to speak at least a bit of English.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 09-29-2019 at 04:04 PM..
Singapore of course. All road signs are in English only. Most forms, mails and information from the government are in English only. Malay is official in Malaysia and Brunei, English is only second. In Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, people make very few mistakes when they use English.
English is officially in HK but most people are reading or watching the news in Cantonese. Television and movies are in Cantonese. Road signs are in both Chinese and English but most HK Chinese remember the roads in Chinese only.
The Philippines uses English as the main written language, but not as the default spoken language. Menus, receipts, bank documents, etc. are in English only in the Philippines. I haven't actually seen a restaurant menu in the Philippines that is written in Filipino, although a lot of dishes might be listed in their Filipino names only. If there are any descriptions of the dish, those are pretty much only in English. Philippine driver's licenses are only in printed English. While many Filipinos (esp those who do not need to speak to foreigners or don't have jobs that involve much reading/writing) are not comfortable with speaking English, it is odd if anyone needs any major help in day-to-day tasks only using English in the Philippines.
English is official in Hong Kong, but vast majority defaults to Chinese/Cantonese in both written and spoken form in daily life.
English no longer has official status in Malaysia, and Malay is the language most used in signs and documents, followed by Chinese.
^Even Senate hearings in the Philippines are conducted in English. WTH?
they can speak tagalog or visaya if they want (they should just hire translators like they do in the UN)
but they want to sound more sophisticated by speaking English
just look at Senator Pacman
up to the 70s, the media still broadcast in English then they changed to Tagalog and nobody cared. People didnt lose their ability to speak English (at least those who reached high school)
Nah, that's not great if it comes at the cost of losing other languages. There's a lot of interesting things that arise in thought processes when you use different language structures and losing that would probably be net negative over the ease a global language. I assume this also means that you aren't able to speak anything aside from English.
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