u/Betulaster

Most Malaysian Chinese people are expected to know how to speak Chinese, Malay and English. This trilingualism isn't unique -- other societies like those in Hong Kong or Switzerland do it too. But ours is different in that all three languages are pretty distant from each other. They come from different families (Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Indo-European) so their core vocabularies (like numbers, kinship terms, pronouns) don't overlap much etymologically. And they're pretty different grammatically too (analytic, agglutinative, fusional). So familiarity in one doesn't really help much with learning the other two. But I suppose this is why most of us suck at being fluent in any of them 😅