let me talk about the situation in malaysia. the chinese from different area speak different dialects. In penang, they speak hokkien, in south malaysia, the people mostly speak mandarin, in north malaysia,like ipoh and our capital city Kuala Lumpur, many people speak cantonse. in sabah and sarawak ,they might speak hakka and fu zhou. so since we have a lot of dialects, we also use mandarin to unite all malaysian chiense.