Language, learning, identity, privilege

James Soriano
Philippine Daily Inquirer
10:44 PM September 10th, 2011
http://opinion.inquirer.net/11649/language-learning-identity-privilege

English is the language of learning. I’ve known this since before I could go to school. As a toddler, my first study materials
were a set of flash cards that my mother used to teach me the English alphabet.

My mother made home conducive to learning English: all my storybooks and coloring books were in English, and so were
the cartoons I watched and the music I listened to. She required me to speak English at home. She even hired tutors to
help me learn to read and write in English.

In school I learned to think in English. We used English to learn about numbers, equations and variables. With it we
learned about observation and inference, the moon and the stars, monsoons and photosynthesis. With it we learned
about shapes and colors, about meter and rhythm. I learned about God in English, and I prayed to Him in English.

Filipino, on the other hand, was always the “other” subject – almost a special subject like PE or Home Economics, except
that it was graded the same way as Science, Math, Religion and English. My classmates and I used to complain about
Filipino all the time. Filipino was a chore, like washing the dishes; it was not the language of learning. It was the language
we used to speak to the people who washed our dishes.

We used to think learning Filipino was important because it was practical: Filipino was the language of the world outside
the classroom. It was the language of the streets: it was how you spoke to the tindera when you went to the tindahan,
what you used to tell your katulong that you had an utos, and how you texted manong when you needed “sundo na.”

These skills were required to survive in the outside world, because we are forced to relate with the tinderas and the
manongs and the katulongs of this world. If we wanted to communicate to these people – or otherwise avoid being
mugged on the jeepney – we needed to learn Filipino.

That being said though, I was proud of my proficiency with the language. Filipino was the language I used to speak with
my cousins and uncles and grandparents in the province, so I never had much trouble reciting.

It was the reading and writing that was tedious and difficult. I spoke Filipino, but only when I was in a different world like
the streets or the province; it did not come naturally to me. English was more natural; I read, wrote and thought in English.
And so, in much of the same way that I learned German later on, I learned Filipino in terms of English. In this way I
survived Filipino in high school, albeit with too many sentences that had the preposition “ay.”

It was really only in university that I began to grasp Filipino in terms of language and not just dialect. Filipino was not
merely a peculiar variety of language, derived and continuously borrowing from the English and Spanish alphabets; it was
its own system, with its own grammar, semantics, sounds, even symbols.

But more significantly, it was its own way of reading, writing and thinking. There are ideas and concepts unique to Filipino
that can never be translated into another. Try translating bayanihan, tagay, kilig or diskarte.

Only recently have I begun to grasp Filipino as the language of identity: the language of emotion, experience, and even of
learning. And with this comes the realization that I do, in fact, smell worse than a malansang isda. My own language is
foreign to me: I speak, think, read and write primarily in English. To borrow the terminology of Fr. Bulatao, I am a split-
level Filipino.

But perhaps this is not so bad in a society of rotten beef and stinking fish. For while Filipino may be the language of
identity, it is the language of the streets. It might have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the
language of the learned.
It is neither the language of the classroom and the laboratory, nor the language of the boardroom, the court room, or the
operating room. It is not the language of privilege. I may be disconnected from my being Filipino, but with a tongue of
privilege I will always have my connections.

So I have my education to thank for making English my mother language.

(Soriano is a senior BS Management student at Ateneo de Manila University. He has a weekly column, Ithink, in the
Students & Campuses section of Manila Bulletin.)

Aquino’s speaking in Tagalog/Filipino, a weird affectation

August 1, 2015 12:45 am

http://www.manilatimes.net/aquinos-speaking-in-tagalogfilipino-a-weird-affectation/205403/

GIVEN the millions that the Palace (or Office of the President) spends annually on its communications office, the
president’s spokesmen, its messaging/speechwriting staff, and its public relations consultants, to say nothing of the
billions sunk in the black hole of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), we presume that the Administration
always has enough change to spare for the hiring of able English translators of the President’s more important public
speeches, like the annual state of the nation address.
As is his wont since the beginning of his presidency in 2010, President Aquino delivers his addresses in Tagalog/Filipino,
for reasons that are unclear and wrapped in mystery.
We raise this point about a translation service because with President Aquino’s sixth and final SONA, delivered last
Monday, July 27, we were once again confronted by the dilemma of publishing the Tagalog/Filipino text of the address in
its entirety, and doing an English translation ourselves in order to serve our readers. We posted the Tagalog/Filipino text
in our website. That we did not bother to translate it into English is something which we are confident our readers will
forgive.
This problem has recurred time and again during the last five years, because of the President’s policy to use
Tagalog/Filipino, for his public addresses.
This policy stands in marked contrast with nearly all of the Tagalog/Filipino presidents since the birth of our republic in
1898. While our first president, President Emilio Aguinaldo, delivered his public addresses and statements in Spanish, all
our other presidents since 1935 gave their speeches in English, until the advent of Mr. Aquino in 2010.
To deliver public addresses exclusively in Tagalog may seem laudable and highly patriotic. But it quickly turns into just a
quirk of personality and affectation when you view it against the broad perspective of our public life and the conduct of our
relations with other nations and the world.
The fact is, our public affairs are generally or wholly conducted in English. Both houses of Congress hold their sessions in
English. The Supreme Court and the entire judiciary hear cases in English. No member of the Cabinet talks to the public
in Tagalog/Filipino. Only Mr. Herminio Coloma of the Palace communications office has copied the weird affectation of
communicating to the media and the public in Tagalog/Filipino – which results in incoherent communications.
What lies behind this policy of President Aquino?
The simplest explanation is that he adopted it because it is his prerogative as President, commander-in-chief and chief of
state. With typically bizarre reasoning, he and his advisers probably believe that by his speaking entirely and often in
Tagalog/Filipino, he will be able to communicate more effectively with his countrymen, most of whom are conversant in
Tagalog/Filipino and in English only in a limited way.
It doesn’t seem to matter to this president that when he speaks in Tagalog/Filipino exclusively, he discriminates against
English speakers in this country. He walls off whole segments of the population, while favoring only those born to and
schooled in Tagalog, which in reality is what our national language is.
The policy becomes absurd when the President takes it to places where the native language is not Tagalog/Filipino. The
anomaly was highlighted during the launch of the modernization project for the Mactan air terminal in Cebu province,
where he decided to speak to the Cebuano audience in Tagalog/Filipino. He walled himself from his live audience, and
was criticized by the Cebu media.
Audiences that are walled off and who would want to read the English translation of Aquino’s speeches include the
following:
The Filipino intelligentsia, who by definition are the educated or intellectual people in a society or community.
Foreign nationals and expatriates who live, work or do business in this country, including foreign investors who are
coveted by the government, all of whom can speak and write in English.
The community of scholars and researchers who carry on the work of teaching in our institutions of learning.
Practically all daily newspapers in the country, which are uniformly published in English. The only ones publishing in
Tagalog/Filipino are few, and they include such titles as Bulgar and Tiktik.
Radio and television networks prefer to communicate in Tagalog/Filipino to reach their target audiences for marketing
reasons. But that’s not a good reason for the President to speak exclusively in Tagalog/Filipino.
A demented adviser probably advised the president that by opting for Tagalog/Filipino in his communications he will attain
and sustain high approval ratings. Yet this clearly has not happened because his ratings are now below 40 percent.
Still, the heart of our complaint as a daily newspaper is that the government does not provide and can easily approve a
translation service for Aquino’s speeches. We are challenged to spend for our own translations. When the palace finally
comes up with an English translation of a president’s speech, it is long after the advent when publishing the English texts
would be pointless.
It may be that the main point of this administration policy is to wall off media organizations like the Times from the
necessary conversation in our public life, the daily discussions of policy and politics that are so critical in a democracy.
It may be that this is all designed to contain critics and analysts like our Times columnists, who are hard-hitting critics of
the government, by rendering them unable to understand what the president is thinking or doing.