The Formation and Development of Macau's Multilingual Landscape and the Evolution of Its Reflected Language Use
According to several photographs of Macau street scenes from the early part of the last century,combined with the chan-ges in Macau's population figures and the influence of major historical events,it is found that the Portuguese population ac-counted for half of the population at the opening of Macau port,and that Portuguese has been the only official language of Macau for more than four hundred years since then,under the rule of the Portuguese governments.Based on this,it can be judged that the language usage in Macau was bilingual from the beginning.Around the time of the Opium War,due to the gradual expansion of British influence in East Asia and the fact that Hong Kong became an international metropolis from the last century,English was widely used in Macau,resulting in the trilingualism of Macau.This pattern of language use is also reflected in the contemporary linguistic landscape of Macau.This evolution of language use shows that the formation of any na-tional or local language ecology is the result of long-term competition and compromise between local political,economic and so-cial factors.
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