Why Filipino

Why Filipino
First posted 11:35pm (Mla time) Mar 15, 2006
By
Inquirer

FOR some time now, we've been hearing educators and government officials -- all the way up to the President herself -- lamenting the deterioration of English in the Philippines and how this will affect our international competitiveness. All kinds of solutions have been proposed, from the exclusive use of English as a medium of instruction to "English-only" zones in schools.

Last week, the Department of Education released results of the latest National Achievement Test (NAT) administered to high school seniors, and reported that proficiency in Filipino had deteriorated. Specifically, average scores decreased from 61.3 percent (meaning "near mastery") in 2001 to 42.5 percent ("below mastery") in 2005.

What has been the public's response to these latest test results? In stark contrast to the frequent expressions of dismay over alleged deterioration in English proficiency, there has been silence over the NAT findings for Filipino. Many of my fellow professors at the University of the Philippines even missed the story, which appeared in the Inquirer albeit on the upper left hand corner. Several shook their heads in slight dismay; others shrugged their shoulders.

I have different interpretations of these responses. With so many pressing problems of leadership and governance in the country, proficiency in Filipino seems almost like a trivial problem. I suspect many Filipinos actually think it's a language that doesn't even have to be taught because we are, after all, Filipinos. We think all Filipinos will pick up the language almost instinctively, at home, in the streets, through mass media. And if that doesn't happen, it doesn't really matter since we think we don't need Filipino to achieve the Filipino dream, which is to live abroad.

Ice cream slips

I agree that English is important -- I've certainly benefited from a fairly good command of the language in terms of international consultancies. But I also know what it means to lack proficiency in a national language.

I belong to a generation, and class, of Filipinos where Filipino was actually prohibited in school. We alternated between an English and Mandarin Chinese week, when we would be punished if we didn't speak the prescribed language. That meant being punished for speaking in Tagalog (the term "Filipino" was almost never used). Not only that, we were rewarded for squealing on classmates who dared speak the unspeakable -- the stool pigeons given ice cream slips that they could accumulate to get popsicles and ice cream sandwiches.

Did that system work? No. I have classmates who went through that ice cream slip system but didn't get to master English or Mandarin Chinese. Languages can't be forced. But neither can they be learned through classrooms alone. We had Filipino classes in high school, but it consisted of boring lectures on grammar. I eventually learned Filipino when I entered the University of the Philippines; in my junior college year and even today, while fairly comfortable with spoken Filipino, I still have problems with reading and writing.

And I am ashamed about being a Filipino who is not so comfortable with Filipino. And yet, I know I am not alone, and sometimes it isn't just a matter of class. Filipinos in general have suffered from the neglect of a language policy, with tremendous losses in all spheres of public and private life, economically, politically, culturally. I will even argue that we lose international competitiveness because of lack of mastery of our national language.

Schizophrenia

We've suffered a kind of linguistic schizophrenia. The Department of Education, as well as individual schools, kept vacillating about the language to use for teaching, lacking clarity and consistency. We've tried an English-only policy, then Filipino-only, then bilingualism.

It didn't help that Filipino itself, decreed by President Manuel L. Quezon in 1935 as a Tagalog-based national language, developed in fitful spurts. An Institute of National Language was supposed to enrich this language by bringing in words from all our languages, but did this with mixed success, hobbled by disagreements among linguists. In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, riding on a wave of nationalism, purists tried to create "indigenous" words. If the purists had their way, a school dean would now be called "gatguro," and department chairpersons, well, that would have been problematic because "chair" had been translated as "salumpuwit," the holder of the ass.

After 60 years of a Tagalog-based Filipino, we're not quite sure yet about what we have. The other week at a meeting of department "salumpuwits" in the University of the Philippines, we grappled with the theme for our college recognition ceremonies. A committee had proposed "Patuloy na paglinang ng kahusayan para sa kaunlaran ng bayan." It was promptly torn apart, word by word, as grammatically imprecise, and now reads: "Pagpapatuloy na paglinang sa kahusayan para sa kaunlaran ng bayan."

But that only shows how difficult it is to craft a national language. Tagalog uses a lot of duplication of syllables, which the Visayan languages don't. Note though that grammar doesn't always correspond to colloquial use. Even a native Tagalog speaker like news anchor Mike Enriquez of GMA Network 7 was once criticized for thanking viewers, at the end of each newscast, for their "pagtiwala" [trust]. He has since changed that to "pagtitiwala."

Inferiority complex

But the quibbling is all too often over form, rather than substance. We've lagged behind our neighbors in developing a national language. After Indonesia declared independence in 1945, a wise Sukarno chose Malay, a language spoken by a small minority, as the basis for their national language, Bahasa Indonesia. He could have chosen Javanese, which like Tagalog was spoken by the political elite, but this would have created resentment among hundreds of other ethnicities. Today, Bahasa Indonesia is a true national language, used in homes, schools, offices.

I'm afraid we've never really taken our languages seriously. We still call them dialects, the "vernacular," sometimes with an almost derisive tone. When Filipinos migrate, they drop Tagalog or the other "dialects," almost as if the language reminds them of the poverty and deprivation they left behind. The inferiority complex we have with our languages reflects a broader national inferiority complex.

And we're paying the price for that. A group of graduate students in my linguistic anthropology class reported the other day on the Metro Manila Development Authority's Filipino traffic signs, and said that non-Tagalogs, as well as some Tagalogs, actually could not understand some of the signs.

Now if our Filipino is inadequate for communicating with each other on traffic rules, how can we even begin to talk about national values and concepts like nationhood and nationalism?

On Friday, I'll explain why our lack of nationalism, in language and all other spheres of public life, actually makes us less competitive in this age of globalism.