PINOY KASI: Why Filipino

Pinoy Kasi : Why Filipino

First posted 11:35pm (Mla time) Mar 14, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer



Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the March 15, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily 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.





Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.




Pinoy Kasi : Why Filipino (2)

First posted 01:41am (Mla time) Mar 17, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer



Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the March 17, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I'M HERE in Cebu where, earlier this morning, I met Gov. Bellaflor Angara-Castillo of Aurora province, who mentioned that they needed to produce health education materials in different local languages. I was surprised and asked, "But isn't Aurora a Tagalog province?" The governor had to explain that the province now has numerous migrants, mainly Ilocano, but now also including people from as far as the Visayas.

That conversation highlighted just one of the many problems that come from our lack of a national language. Even worse, we seem to be moving backwards, what with the recent Department of Education findings that high school seniors' proficiency in Filipino drastically dropped over the last few years.

Last Wednesday, I looked into our long history of neglecting the development of a national language. We seem to associate Filipino and our other languages with poverty and backwardness. Accompanying this linguistic inferiority complex is an over-valuation of English, which we think provides the key to national development, mainly to export more Filipino workers.

I'd question that assumption, and argue that our neglect of Filipino and our unrealistic expectations of English decrease our competitiveness in the global market.


Nationalism

Our more economically developed neighbors rightly recognize the need to balance nationalism with globalism, and this is reflected in their language policies. In the post-colonial period after World War II, many developing countries pushed hard to craft a national language.

Some countries, like Thailand, were more fortunate because they already had a common language spoken by most of its citizens. Others, like Indonesia and the Philippines, had a more daunting task because of great linguistic diversity. Indonesia was, however, able to develop Bahasa Indonesia while we lagged behind in our development of Filipino.

Some of the reasons for a national language were quite practical: you needed a common language for education, public health, agriculture, industry.

But the most important reason for developing a national language was that of developing a national identity that transcended class, caste, ethnicity, religion. It was important to have a common language to tell the story of a nation, and pass this from one generation to another. And, with time, our neighbors began as well to develop fine literature, written in the national language, capturing the dynamism, the exuberance, as well as the anguish and angst, of national life.


Globalism

A nationalistic policy toward language did not mean xenophobia. Japanese, for example, is peppered with borrowed English words, from home furnishings to high-tech jargon. The Chinese, on the other hand, drew on existing words to describe the wonders of the new technologies: the train is a "fire horse," a computer an "electric brain."

Gradually, our neighbors began to use their national language to open the world to their citizens. Visit bookstores in China, Indonesia or Thailand, and you'll find hundreds of books-the world's finest literature, as well as computer manuals, self-improvement books, textbooks in the social and natural sciences-translated into the local national language.

These countries have come to accept the importance of English and other languages of the world and encourage citizens to learn these languages, through their national language. In a Thai bookstore, you'll find Thai-English, Thai-Japanese, Thai-Chinese, Thai-French dictionaries, to name a few, both in book and electronic forms, the latter with speech synthesizers so you hear the proper pronunciation of foreign words.

Again, the reasons for doing this are very utilitarian: you learn a foreign language not because it's required but because it serves a purpose, often related to national development. So when the Chinese learn English, it's to be able to read the original technical books, or to communicate with visiting technicians. Their goal is to plug into the world to reap its benefits for the home country.

No wonder the West is running scared-the Japanese did it, the Chinese are doing it now, using just enough English (or German, or French) to learn new skills and technologies, which they then copy, often with great improvements.


Talking back

What's happening in the Philippines? We've neglected Filipino and our other languages. Only recently did we recognize that maybe the way to go in schools is to have the local language (e.g., Cebuano) used in the first years of primary school to teach Filipino and other basic subjects, including, for older kids, English.

And even as we laughed at our neighbors for their resistance to English, our own proficiency in that language has stagnated. I often suspect we're not actually seeing a deterioration of English in the Philippines. What's happened is that for most Filipinos, the level of English has remained pretty much the same from the colonial period, just enough to understand the instructions of the boss. Which is why we had such a perfect fit for a particular segment of the overseas labor market.

Now that new opportunities are emerging, such as in the call centers, we're realizing we don't have enough Filipinos who can speak English in a more interactive way, offering information and advice. And when it comes to the most lucrative high-paying jobs and consultancies, we have only a handful of Filipinos who have the ability to analyze problems in English, and to propose and explain solutions.

To capture that market, it won't be enough to just learn English. Filipinos have to be able to use the language spoken at home and bring this to tackle the complexities of the outside world. But since we neglected both Filipino and English in our schools, we have many young Filipinos who just can't communicate.

I despair over the way students in the University of the Philippines grope for words: "Kasi, sir, you know, the ano of the ano is, well, you know it's all very complex." Alas, at the rate we're going, we won't need English or Tagalog. We'll need to teach mind reading in schools.

Proficient neither in Filipino nor English, our worlds will remain limited. We will continue to export Filipinos, but mainly in low-pay service occupations. At home, we suffer too from not being able to develop science and technology, so we end up buying other countries' consumer products.

As we search for solutions to our national aphasia, we might heed the advice of Mahatma Gandhi, who once said Indians have to learn Hindi to speak with each other, and English to speak to the world. I would say we should go for as many languages as possible so we can discover the world, but meantime, let's develop our own languages, too, and our sense of identity, so we can indeed speak with the world, and not just be spoken to. It all boils down to a simple matter of respecting ourselves, so that when the world talks to us, we can talk back.





Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.