Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Honor.

After the approval of House Bill

1022 to make Baybayin the national writing system. Various professionals, language
experts, and critics unfavored this bill. In response to the issue, we respond negatively
by the Department of Education adding baybayin as a core subject at all levels because
this house believes in accordance with the study of Castaneda, De Leon, and Palabino
(2020), baybayin still continues to face controversy with the different takes of citizens on
its implementation such as: how it would affect the current educational curriculum
(considering the lack of knowledge of the language of not only the students, but also the
educators), and several other factors that need consideration in the said discussion. As
Mark De Chavez, a professor at the Department of Linguistics of the University of the
Philippines-Diliman (2020) stated, “baybayin is an unfamiliar language to both Tagalog
and non-Tagalog speakers. As something that has existed many generations ago that
has not been a part of our everyday lives for a very long time. It is alien to all modern
Filipinos for whom Baybayin is not a part of the current written form of their mother
tongue”

Furthermore, in article of Limos (2020), Linguists recognize that spoken language has
primacy over written language. The primacy of spoken language means whatever we
learned to write, we first learned how to say, not the other way around. But because
Baybayin has a very limited set of letters or characters, people will have to learn new
ways to write words that already have their own spelling in the alphabet which makes it
problematic and disadvantageous. For example, there are indigenous words that use
the modern Filipino alphabet, such as Vulan (Moon) in Itawes and Zigattu (East) in
Ibanag. Going back to the primacy of spoken language, these words are written this
way because that’s how their speakers pronounce them. It will be difficult to write these
words in Baybayin while preserving their original orthography and pronunciation.

Madarang (2018), has a valid argument against integrating Baybayin into the present
lexicon. She stated that using the statement of Riza Pingke, an editor of academic
magazines, baybayin would only complicate the present problem of Filipinos not being
able to use the national language properly. However, “we must focus on teaching
Filipino, which is not an utmost priority today in schools. If they want Filipinos to be
nationalistic, Filipino history and language must be promoted. Some critics say
Baybayin is “Tagalog-centric” and regional cultural advocates say such efforts threaten
all of the other 16 nation’s indigenous scripts. As asserted by Michael Pangilinan, one of
the advocates of the Kulitan script in Pampanga, indicated that the Philippines will
become a country that seems to be for the Tagalogs only when the Filipinos can only
use the Baybayin because local identities will be lost or completely wiped out. In fact, it
took root in 1937 when Tagalog was declared the national spoken language, and now it
is the Baybayin of Tagalog, which is expected to be the basis of the written language.
The revival of the Baybayin text will just be another blow for the nation’s linguistic
diversity. Consequently, the Philippine state makes us ashamed of who we are until the
Kapampangan people themselves are the ones repressing their own language and
culture to become Filipinos. Therefore, we are living proof that we instill Filipino
nationalism and cultural identity without Baybayin as a core subject. We do not need to
look for a national indigenous script to affirm that what we speak, write, or read is
Filipino.