Unit 2: Mother Tongue as a Language

Lesson 2.2: My Mother Tongue: The

Language I Learned First

Pelemiano, Hannah Lhyn

BEED 2B
• Mother Tongue - refers to the first
language learned at home in childhood
and still understood by the person at
the time the data was collected. If the
person no longer understands the first
language learned, the mother tongue is
the second language learned.
 Language is dynamic
• The Philippines is a multilingual country.
All Philippine language are Austronesian
languages and Hesperonesia (Western
Austronesian) language. Chavacano ,
however, is a creole language having
Spanish vocabulary but comforming to the
basic Philippine syntax. It is spoken in
Zamboaga and was the language in Cavite
before.
• What is Austronesian?
- Languages of the Pacific islands,
with the exception of Australian and
Papuan languages.

• What is hesperonesia?
-A group of the Austronesian
languages including most of the
languages of the Philippines, Borneo,
Sulawesi, and Madagascar.
• Is the Philippines part of Southeast
Asia, Oceania or the Pacific Islands?
Officially, of course, Filipinos are
categorized as Asians and the
Philippines as part of Southeast Asia.
But describing Filipinos as Pacific
Islanders isn't necessarily wrong
either.
• Language grows and may become
extinct if members of a speech
minority stop using their own
vernacular, leading to the loss of
younger generations’ ability to use it.
• As more innovations are made or more
ideas are conceptualized, the demand
to create a label for ideas and
concepts is also rising. Development in
society requires language to cope its
growth.
• What words do you know
at the moment that was
not yet known perhaps
ten years ago?
• Perhaps most Filipinos would be more
interested to know the number of
languages spoken in the country. However,
this query is not easy to answer for the
exact number may vary depending on how
linguists would categorize them. What is
clear is that there are several languages
coming from the various parts of the
country and many of these have dialects
which are morphophonemically
distinguishable from their mother language.
Language are not usually spoken in
the same manner from one part of
the country to the another. The
differences in the way members of a
speech community speak are
described as regional or social
variations (dialect or sociolects).
There are cases where there is a
continuum of language.
In general, language is defined as any
particular system of human communication.
The system consists of structured
arrangement of sounds and their written
representation that can lead to larger
units i.e. morphemes, words, sentences,
utterances. Sometimes, it is understood as
what is spoken by a group of people in a
particular country, such as hindi in India,
Mandarin in China, or Catalan in Spain.
The Philippines is a multilingual
country and out of the big number of
language, the Department of
Education selected at least eight
mother tongues that can be use in
school. Initial focus on materials
development, training teachers, and
assessment of learning were in the
language officially selected for
instructioning the MTB MLE Program.
THANK
YOU 