Originally Posted by
Rejuvenated
I'm not saying this applies to you. But quite often if a native Cantonese speaker hears your accent and can tell you are not a native speaker or a CBC, that native speaker often has a tendancy to respond to you in English.
That is right - that does not apply to me. I am a 100% native Cantonese speaker and not an ABC or CBC. 9 years of being Americanized should not have taken away my native tone and accent.
Originally Posted by
hau cheng
There have been some interesting points made, particularly the one regarding the issue of 'face' and cantonese speakers less willing to speak PTH (this is a most common phen').
Just to the other side of the coin, perhaps some reply in English to Chinese looking people because it is a face issue for the employee, ie, they are proving 'something'
That reminds me of a friend telling me that he recently got into a dispute with a middle-aged man in an elevator in Hong Kong. The man suddenly switched to English (cough... broken) and started threatening to sue of some non-sense human rights violation. My friend, being in the US 2 times longer than me, immediately responded with fluent English and made a point that Chinese should communicate in mother-tone in Chinese sovereignty. The man left "faceless" as my friend described.
zhaobao brought up a valid point that CX should, however, at least use the language of the origin and destination city/county as well as English. On my recent Thai Air Asia flight HKG-HKT, all announcements were made in English-Thai-Mandarin IIRC.