Maggie Cheung Man-yuk 张曼玉, a famous Hong Kong star reportedly is a polyglot - that's someone who knows and is able to use several languages. In the 1991 Hong Kong film directed by Stanley Kwan, Center Stage, she switched from Cantonese to Mandarin and to Shanghainese and vice versa with ease; and in the film Clean directed by her ex-husband Frenchman Olivier Assayas, she performed in fluent English, French and Cantonese. The fashion icon from Hollywood Golden Age, star of My Fair Lady, the late Audrey Hepburn reportedly spoke five languages and probably is a polyglot too. Not so sure about Meryl Streep though. In Sophie’s Choice, Meryl Streep spoke Deutsch and Polish in various scenes but then she received language training courses before filming. Although she was of English and Germanic decent, having been born in America, she reportedly has not learned a second or third language. As for the Hong Kong star, her being raised in Hong Kong and England and ten years' stay in Paris made her a polyglot. Come to think about it, a number of Malaysian with Chinese roots should be polyglots too. In fact, many are either bilingual or trilingual. Those who attend Chinese school especially could speak the Malay language, besides Mandarin and the Chinese dialect they speak at home be it Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hainanese; and English too,a language they can pick up at school or their working place. When I met a Chinese-looking American lass early this year, I was honestly surprised to hear that she could just speak English.
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