Filipino, the language

that is not one

Filipino is the national language that seeks to become more than a native tongue and
aspires to become the nations official speech. It is contaminated and compromised
from the start by the very languages it seeks to exclude or subordinate.
Vicente L. Rafael
Published 3:30 PM, August 21, 2015
Updated 6:56 AM, Aug 24, 2015

The ghost month of August is also celebrated as Buwan ng Wika. It is

dedicated topropagating the national language, Filipino, at a time when there
has been on-going debate as to its future in the curriculum of higher
education, thanks to the reforms being contemplated by the Commission on
Higher Education (CHED).

Those who teach and advocate the wider use of Filipino see CHED as
threatening its place with the current proposals to abolish its teaching as a
language at the university level in the coming years. Instead, universities
would be left to decide which courses would be in Filipino and which in
English.
Claiming that without proper protections, Filipino will not be able to match the
sway of English among students and fearing the loss of their jobs, teachers of
Filipino have been fierce in their opposition to such proposals.
To clarify the stakes in this current debate, we might begin by inquiring about
the nature of Filipino itself.
What kind of a language is it? What is the ideology and politics of its
development? And how is its emergence linked to European colonial and
romantic ideas about the power of the nation-state to order, in all sense of that
word, linguistic and cultural differences? To answer these questions, we can
turn to the highly instructive document, Frequently Asked Questions on
Filipino, issued by the Komisyon sa Wikang Pambansa (Commission on
National Language).
Filipino, according to the Komisyon, is not one language but two. It is both a
national and because based on Tagaloga native language.
However, Filipino also seeks to differentiate itself from its origins in Tagalog. It
begins by substituting Filipino for Pilipino, using the letter f found in other
vernaculars in order to distance itself from Tagalog that has only the letter p.
Furthermore, by contrast to the plurality of Tagalog dialects, the Komisyon
insists that there ought to be only one Filipino: that which has been
standardized by the Surians offices and prescribed in schools. Its as if

Filipino can become truly national only when it has definitively subordinated
the many Tagalogs to the one Filipino. Becoming national thus entails that
Filipino establish itself on top of Tagalog, translating the latter into an
instrument with which to achieve a trans-local reach as the language not of
one group but of everyone in the archipelago.
Preservation of vernaculars
And what of the many other vernaculars throughout the archipelago?
As with Tagalog, so too with other native tongues. The Komisyon calls for their
preservation and use as auxiliary languages in the learning of Filipino and in
the enhancement of its national reach. Such a call implies two things. First,
that native languages are in danger of disappearing or, at the very least, falling
into obscurity. For this reason, they are in need of protection. Second, that as
the language learned from birth, they should be pressed into serving as
assistants in the apprehension of Filipino. The mother tongues are meant to
nurture the growth of the national language itself.
Vernaculars, from the perspective of the Komisyon, take on a dual and
somewhat contradictory aspect. They are both essential and supplementary
indeed, as endangered as they are robust. Like mothers, they are expected to
take care of the speech of the youngstudents from K-3rd grades, for
example, who, since 2012, have been taught first in their mother tongues
before being taught Filipino and English.
But just as one grows up to leave ones mother, students are supposed to
mature to the point of being able to leave behind those very mother tongues.
At once indispensible and disposable, native tongues exist once again in the
service of the national, supporting it to the extent that they are subordinate to
it.

As one of the mother tongues, Tagalog is meant to share the same fate as the
other vernaculars. Insofar as Filipino grows out of Tagalog, the Komisyon
claims that Tagalog is naturally superior to other vernaculars. It cites the
authority of various American authors, who, harking back to early Spanish
missionaries, point to Tagalog as the most refined and intellectually
developed of the vernaculars.
Hence, while the Komisyon claims that there exists a natural kinship among all
Philippine languages, thereby making each readily familiar and easy to learn,
this family relationship is also an unequal one. Just as the national language
rules over its native origin, so is Tagalog situated as first among its linguistic
siblings. And it does so based on what non-Tagalogs and non-Filipinos have
said about it.
Hierarchy of languages
This hierarchy of languages that privileges Tagalog over other vernaculars is
further buttressed by another key distinction that the Komisyon makes: that
between native and foreign languages. Native languages are those that are
natural to their speakers: they grow up speaking it as a first language, learned
presumably from their mothers or someone who assumes that role.
Foreign languages are those that come from the outside, spoken by nonnatives. English and the varieties of Chinese languages fall into this latter
category. According to the Komisyon, foreign languages will always remain
foreign. They cannot and do not grow naturally on Philippine soil. They thus
exist as unassimilable languages, beyond naturalization and localization.
Wholly distinct from all the mother tongues, they can, at best, be step-mother
tongues. They can never aspire to become a national language.

By essentializing the place of English and Chinese languages as irreducibly

alien and outside the nation, the Komisyon thus disavows the plain fact that
both languages are spoken by sizeable numbers of people as either their first
language at home, or as a lingua franca across ethno-linguistic divides. Just
as vernacular languages are mother tongues that naturally belong to the
national language as their essential supplements, so foreign languages can
only be alien impositions that intrude and disrupt the family romance among
languages.
Harking back to German idealist notions that conceive of the national
language as the very spirit that animates national culture, the Komisyon holds
that Filipino leading the mother tongues will ensure the life of the nation. Such
a task becomes all the more imperative in the face of the threat posed by
foreign languages French in the case of a Germany under Napoleonic
occupation, English in the case of the Philippines still under the American
colonial shadow.
External to the nation, foreign languages from the perspective of romantic
nationalism, can only spell the death of national culture. Such views have
been espoused by writers as diverse as Fichte and Cabral, Jose Rizal and
Renato Constantino. Subordinating the mother tongues while overcoming
foreign languages is the manner by which Filipino underwrites what the
Komisyon regards to be the cultural vitality of the nation-state.
Its not too hard to see how this linguistic nationalism continues the legacy of
colonial ideology, which tends to map linguistic hierarchy onto social hierarchy.
We can further see this continuity in the role of the State, especially in the
area of education. While Filipino has long assumed the status of a national
language, it has also long aspired to become the sole official language. Such

aspirations have been constrained by English, which continues to be the

dominant language of the State, as sanctioned by the Constitution. The
English-using State thus comes across as an alien presence when addressing
the nation conceived in Filipino-Tagalog terms. This linguistic divide echoes a
long history of conflict between the State a colonial innovation introduced by
the Spaniards--and the nation--a belated development that emerged in and
through the contradictions of colonial governance by the late nineteenth
century.
Filipino as the putatively authentic language of the nation seeks to defend the
latter from the abuses, imagined or real, of the English-speaking State deeded
directly by the American colonial regime.
However, the Filipino-speaking nation also needs the English-speaking State
to fund its programs and schools, provide teachers salaries and pensions, set
rules and curricula for its students. Without the State, the nation would be
without the institutional resources it needs to survive amid a welter of social
pressures and ethnic differences. Just as English during the American period
excluded Spanish to become hegemonic over other languages in the
Philippines, so, too, does Filipino in the post-war Republic now seek to
displace English.
Gradualist approach
This change, however, is seen to happen gradually, sometime in the future,
once Filipino is deemed ready to take over English. Such a gradualist
approach echoes the politics of independence under US rule when Filipinos
were promised eventual sovereignty once the US judged them capable of
governing themselves.

Filipinos ability to replace English as the official language is hence subject to

constant delay and deferral. A staple contention of the Komisyon is that
Filipino is still a language in development. It is yet to be fully intellectualized
and is still not quite capable of serving as an adequate language for conveying
knowledge derived from the West. Where Filipino is concerned, the task of
translation is forever beginning. As such, advocates of Filipino are acutely
conscious of its position as not being quite equal to, and not being as modern
as, English.
Structurally subordinate to English, Filipino is seen by its proponents to be
always already vulnerable to attack and diminution. It requires protection and
nourishment both from the nations mother tongues and from the State. At the
same time, it is always on the verge of being betrayed by both. The mother
tongues grumble and threaten to rebel against the so-called impositions of
imperial Filipino. The State, for its part, continues to insist on the use of
English for addressing the world and its own population. Despite the
Presidents use of the national language in his addresses, Ingleseros in the
State and among elites, along with a growing horde of Fil-Am and Fil-foreign
scholars and returnees, are seen to threaten the place of Filipino in schools
and society.
Filipino thus occupies an ambiguous position, perhaps analogous to many
other vernacularly-based national languages around the world.
It is the first among vernaculars even as it is rendered subordinate and
intellectually beneath the other official language, English. It is the language of
the nation that remains dependent upon, yet resistant to, the State. It seeks to
protect the imagined integrity of a national culture that is at the same time
infiltrated by, and infused with, a dizzying array of foreign borrowings,

traversed by a history of colonial occupations and, more recently, the forces of

globalization.
Filipino is the national language that seeks to become more than a native
tongue and aspires to become even as it chronically fails the nations
official speech. It is thus itself only by becoming other, asserting (even as it
seeks to transcend) its given condition. It is contaminated and compromised
from the start by the very languages it seeks to exclude or subordinate: the
foreign and the vernacular.
Filipino bases its authority on its claim to serve as the authentic and
democratic medium for conveying the sentiments of the nation and unifying its
disparate parts. The strength of this claim, however, is also its weakness. Its
authority, based on the claim of authenticity, also means that it thrives on the
pathos of colonial victimization and nationalist injury characteristic of romantic
ideology.
Contradictions of Filipino
Like the nation, Filipino is often regarded as oppressed and vulnerable to
attack by foreign interests and languages. Its self-confessed intellectual
unpreparedness requires constant support, while its institutional
marginalization triggers dissent.
Holding out the promise of bringing about a more just and unified nation,
proponents of Filipino decry the betrayals of elites and unjust treatment in the
hands of the English-using State and its universities. At the same time, it
seeks to consolidate, in the face of linguistic pluralism, a linguistic hierarchy
and, in the midst of cosmopolitan globalization, a nativist exceptionalism.

As I pointed out earlier, the pattern of enforcing a hierarchy of languages in

order to manage the insistence of heterogeneous, populist, and often
insurgent expressiveness are the historical legacies of Spanish and American
rule. The debates about the national language, such as they are, are thus
borne by what we might think of as the linguistic colonial unconscious
deposited into the foundations of a national culture constantly under pressure
from regional and global changes.
Such are the irresolvable contradictions of Filipino the language that is not
one. Its condition, if the Komisyon is to be believed, mirrors that of the nation
conceived as distinct from, yet dependent upon, the State itself. The
vicissitudes of Filipino thus encapsulates the conundrum of the countrys
national culture today and no doubt for some time to come.
Filipino is the national language that seeks to become more than a native
tongue and aspires to become even as it chronically fails to be the nations
official speech. It is contaminated and compromised from the start by the very
languages it seeks to exclude or subordinate. Rappler.com