Are Mandarin and Cantonese two different languages?
Just look at it this way, China is a big country, for thousand of years, chinese people migrated from the north of China and settled at different parts of China quite isolated. Overtime, their language evolved slight separately for various regions which what we now call dialects. Cantonese and Mandarin are both Chinese dialects, but Mandarin had been accepted as the official/common chinese language. 2 chinese from different dialect groups should normally converse in Mandarin as it is the common chinese language worldwide. Malaysian Chinese and Singapore Chinese are mostly decendents of chinese from Southern China, as such they are from various dialect groups found in Southrn China e.g, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Quangxi, Hainan and others. Mandarin is the official chinese language for the chinese living in Malaysia and Singapore. Unofficially, most Singapore chinese converse in Hokkien. As for Malaysia it is a little bit interesting, different localities converse in different
