The Current Linguistic Situation of the Philippines

by Marlon “Al” Mandane

dated 3 September , 2014, revised 9 February, 2015

Throughout history, people have been mistaking the two essential words "dialect" and
"language". How? Languages have their own branches of dialects which are almost similar or
intelligible with their mother language (origin) according to research but if they are mixed
with policies like those in our education system, linguistic issues will brew. Why? Let us go
first to the Philippines where supposedly there are recognized 185 languages (4 of them are
now extinct).

All of them, except Chavacano (which is further divided into 6 variants:

Zamboangueño, Caviteño, Cotabateño, Ternateño, Castellano Abakay, and Ermitense (now
extict)), which is a Spanish-based creole, belong to Austronesian language family. Ironically,
the political system is a unitary one, so only 2 of them are recognized as official languages
("Filipino" and English"). How come?
 In brief, it is due to the grave "nationalistic" need of those in the Commission of
Filipino Language (Kumisyon sa Wikang Filipino) to unify whole Filipinos with a language
based on Tagalog. The President Manuel Quezon (1935-1944) pursued and implemented the
foundations for a bilingual education system, which gained full fruits from 1959 onward.
Thus, from then on, most Filipinos celebrate the so-called "Buwan ng Wika" or "Language
Month". How ironic is it? There so many languages of the Philippines then a sugarcoated
variant of Tagalog, renamed Pilipino then Filipino, is only "encouraged"? Its negative side is
that subconsciously, non-Tagalog languages are ostracized without their full-hand
conscience. Without the government support for the rarest languages and heritage found
there, they would be killed, thus completing the pro-"Filipino" people's victory against the
plurilingual society of the Philippines. Here is a excerpt from this news article which was
published on 2008:

Also, the Filipino language is, in essence, actually Tagalog. Try writing in Ilonggo and call it
Filipino-Ilonggo and see if Dr. Acuña of the National Language Institute will agree to that.
Also, Tagalogs claim that we Ilonggos have a ?regional defect? because we don't say "po" or
"ho."

Regarding the fact that Filipino language is just an artificial variant of

Tagalog.

Regardless of the sugarcoating done by many of us, we cannot deny that

Filipino is a dialect of Tagalog, not the other way done. Here is an opinion by Sir
Aurelio Agcaoili, an advocate of multilingualism, co-founder of Nakem
Conferences , a consortium of advocates of diversity, cultural pluralism, linguistic justice,
and emancipatory education:

The educational template of the Philippines is one that does exactly the
opposite: students are schooled in the language of other people’s languages, with
their schooling basically a rote memorization afforded by Tagalog (well, for
Constitutional reasons that some would like to read: P/Filipino) and English. Thus
we have students who never learned who they are and yet are expected to learn
other people’s sense of who they are through the second or third languages,
Tagalog and English, languages that are constantly rammed into their throat as
soon as they get into their classrooms, the ramming consistent and legal but
never moral and culturally just, until they all become cultural and linguistic
parrots.

It is something curious, thus, that while many of the nation-states of the world
that followed the route of the fossilized view of ‘national’ language are revisiting
the linguistic injustice and cultural tyranny that they systematically effected in
order to glorify their nation-state a la Napoleon who had to deny his being
Corsican in the name of the glorious French language, the Philippines is still going
the route to ‘national’ language, a concept that valorizes, privileges, and gives
 entitlements to one and only one language.

We can grant here, tentatively, the virtue of ‘national’ language as defined by

well-meaning scholars of Philippine languages as the imagined medium of
communication among the peoples of the Philippines.

But we cannot close our eyes to the fact that in an effort to do so, taxpayers’
money and the scarce resources of the country have been used to promote,
sustain, develop, and teach Tagalog (well, now, they call it with another name).
Except for token support from some government agencies for token awards or
grants for some token cultural programs, no support of the magnitude given to
Tagalog has ever been given to other Philippine languages, major or minor. The
1987 Constitution of the Philippines provides for the its translation into the major
languages. We do not know if, apart from Tagalog, that Constitution has ever
been translated into the languages of all the peoples of the Philippines so that,
like the claim to the Philippines as some kind of a working democracy, people
could say, in their own language, that their basic human right to their own
language is guaranteed by their own Constitution. This means that this failure is
itself a proof of unconstitutional acts of the Philippine Government, its pertinent
language and culture agencies included.

Summarizing his opinion, most Filipinos think that language equals nationalism.
There sprouts a flawed conclusion that "if you are a real Filipino or a loyal Philippine
citizen, you should speak it". For their side, I will share this shameful baseless video [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3HnHPaG1B0 ].

Accompanying the clip is his article "Debunking PH Language Myths". By the way, Michael
David San Juan is a professor at DLSU (De La Salle University in Taft Ave., Manila) and also
one of the advocates for the restoration of 9 units of "Filipino" in college. Well. About that
article, when reading by context, he usually bashes those who he accuses as "regionalists"
although Philippines have around 185 languages (43 of them are institutional) then along
with the Democatic-Nationalists only recognizes the implemented version of Tagalog as the
national language. How did those "regionalists" react to this? Let us read Ramirez Joven's
reactionary which can be read here. He is also a plurilingual advocate which opposes the
nationalistic view of linguistics.

An excerpt from his reaction article:

This is clearly a political issue of the central government in Manila versus the
people. For a long time, people have been forced to not speak their native
languages in schools. The economic development around Manila has forced people
to migrate to Manila, and adopt their language. In 1987 the Constitution decided to
develop Filipino on a more egalitarian basis with non-Tagalogs than in the past, but
this development is half-hearted. You cannot call borrowings here and there
 "development of a language". The KWF has been given twenty-six years to do its
job, and it has come up with ONLY that. There is no grammatical effort to be
inclusive of every culture in the Philippines.

Unity in Diversity

In short, linguistics is not covered by political borders. A language is even spoken

through many countries like Spanish and English. Likewise, inside a country like the
Philippines, there are many languages. I am not trying to say that we should be
independent from the Philippines or rebel against the government but I, along with the
advocators for cultural diversity and pluricultural confidence, want to express our views
among our people and insprire many of our people to struggle for their self-identity , so
that we could reconcile with history.
Intellectualizing his/her own language will lead to development?

Let us ask here, what kind of development? IS it an economic one? a socio-linguistic

one? or both? Actually, language is not just a key to development but also the quality of
education received by students and cultural values embedded to a nation. Here is one of
the articles where we must consider. One of its detected flaws by plurilingualists is the
scope of the participants, who are mainly students. "The sample consisted of four- to six-
year-old children who belonged to urban poor families, had Filipino as their first
language, and had not yet gone to school" (Aquino. 2012). This implicated that the
current bilingual system is ineffective. Thus, they should focus their teaching only on
one of them, when in fact the issue is the subconscious linguisticide due to the lack of
facilities to intellectualize the other Philippine languages. In short, the methodologies of
the research could be also done to other children at non-Filipino speaking regions. I will
supply the mother-tongue based observations and survey next time to support the claim
that children should be taught in a multilingual society and not upon only in the languages
which many non-Tagalog peoples are not familiar enough. At last, to conclude this topic, I
will just share an article, as a great summary or closing remarks.

"The timeless temptations of Tagalogism and Tagalogization under the guise of a national
language (part 3)" by Mr. Aurelio Agcaoili
The discourse of these same people is the same discourse we have heard more
than seven decades ago except that now, with the lobotomized agents of
uniculturalism and monolingualism in Philippine education by their sleeves and
pockets, they are more boisterous now, their loud noises their bluff to make us
cower in fear and accept their illogicalities and bad because unproductive gospel
of monolingualism in favor of the language of the center.

If we looked at their discourses, we can see the same rehashed arguments, some
of them empty of content as they are self-serving: (a) the valuing of regional
languages is ‘impractical’ and that (b) we have to give ‘Tagalog’ language—the
basis, they say, of the national language—a chance. We gave Tagalog one fat
chance for seven decades and it did not deliver the goods except to destroy
millions and millions of us.

These arguments come from people who know no other Philippine languages,
even if some of them, as one has said, that they can curse in other languages.

Even this admission of cursing in a language not really your own is an admission
 of guilt: that you have no respect for languages other than your own because you
cannot see these languages as the dwelling place of a people’s soul owning these
languages except as your language for cursing. This admission is itself an
admission of failure in the unqualified respect that we all have to give to
language and cultural rights as an expression of our respect for fundamental
human rights. What we have therefore are culturally entrenched practitioners of
Tagalogism and Tagalogization—cultural agents of injustice—who can only afford
to tell us that Manila is the center of the Philippine world and that whatever
Manila does is the truth.

The call for a ‘national’ language did not come as a pure and pristine call for
nation building.

The motives, as history would tell us, are a mixed bag of personal defense
against the charge of multilingual incompetence to the outright internal neo-
colonization agendum by the same people who were—are—announcing liberation
to our people.

We go the route of Manuel Luis Quezon and his flawed preference for the
Philippines ‘run like hell by Filipinos’ than by, say, ‘run like heaven by
Americans.’ Using that and other language claims, he would argue for the process
of decolonization by following the route of the nation-state model imported from
Spain, Germany, England, and France. That was his template for the Philippine
nation-state speaking a single language. In his own words, he went to Vigan, had
the ‘misfortune’ of using an Ilokano interpreter so he could talk with the Ilokano
people, and which experience humbled him so, and which, in many ways,
prodded him to push for a ‘national’ language that he understood and he could
use, to speak with the Filipino, who, in his imagination, would now be all
parroting Tagalog words and phrases learned unimaginatively in many
unimaginative Tagalog language classrooms. Read the subtext here—which
subtext he also said in that speech in Letran College: imagine me a President
speaking to my people using an Ilokano interpreter because I do not speak
Ilokano. And so his imperial solution: let everyone speak Tagalog, the Tagalog of
the President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines.

Finally, case assured that you are more familiar now with out wretched linguistic
situation, just like in some other countries.

To God be the Glory!