The majority of ethnic Chinese people living in Malaysia came from China during the
Ming and
Qing dynasties, between the 15th and early 20th centuries. Earlier immigrants married Malays and assimilated to a larger extent than later waves of migrants – they form a distinct sub-ethnic group known as the
Peranakans, and their descendants speak Malay. The majority of immigrants were speakers of
Hokkien (
Min Nan),
Cantonese,
Hakka,
Teochew, and
Hainanese. In the 19th century, Qing immigrants to Malaya had no single common language and were mostly uneducated peasants, and they tended to cluster themselves according to the ethno-linguistic group, usually corresponding to their place of origin, and worked with relatives and other speakers of the same language. In 1879, according to Isabella Bird, a visitor to the
tin mining boomtown of
Taiping,
Perak, "five topolects of Chinese are spoken, and Chinamen constantly communicate with each other in Malay, because they can't understand each other's Chinese". The Chinese languages spoken in Malaysia have over the years become localized (e.g.
Penang Hokkien), as is apparent from the use of
Malay and
English loan words. Words from other Chinese languages are also injected, depending on the
educational and
cultural background of the speaker. Mandarin in Malaysia has also been localized, as a result of the influence of other Chinese variants spoken in Malaysia, rather than the Malay language. Loan words were discouraged in Mandarin instructions at local Chinese school and were regarded as mispronunciations. ==See also==