Tag Archives: Language

Notes from a Language Exercise

Jesuits Notes

These notes are about an exercise tried out in a graduate school cultural anthropology class. The exercise involved bringing some current fieldwork material into class. The results were interesting both for few things learned about one indigenous Mindanao language and for few seeds of anthropological contemplation quietly sown on well-prepared soil.
The session began with two or three rounds of listening to some digital recording. After the first round, the students were asked, “What language was that?” In an earlier session, they had given their ethnic affiliations as Bisaya, Ilongo, Tagakaolo, Arumanen Manobo, Waray, Maranao, Tagalog, Ilocano, Iranun,  Bikolano, or a combination of some of these. they were native users of the languages of their respective groups. Moreover, everyone was fluent in two or three Philippine languages. In answer to the question, each indicated that the language in the recording was not one they  knew.

The follow-ups was, ” Inspite of that, were you still able to understand it?” Not surprisingly, they had different degrees of understanding. The class as a whole, however, agreed over the general meaning of what was said in the recording, although as one student put it, “Not word for word .” For the second round thus, the class was listening more intently.

Next, a transcript of the recording was provided to each student. Attention shifted to written text, although the recording was played back a third time. The class told to put aside temporarily all questions about the circumstances of the recording and of the transcription, and the like. Instead, they were to direct their attention to the two principal speakers.

The transcript was as follows:

A: Umm, sige.

B.:Binukid?

A: Ho-o.

B: Yan a si Sonny Boy Talasan, taga Nabawang, inuekek ta Pulangiyen, apo hi Datu Mandublas alias Datu Kunog-kunog.

Yan a kinamagulangan na bata hi Nay-iluyan claw hi Man-iluyan. Sa ngaran papa ko si Nestor, sa mama kw si Susan. Bisan man sikay… aw, pobre da ba, sikay gihapon paniguro. Ah! Yan da.

A: Hapila alan-alan ho mga soesoeloed no?

B: Aw, kuan, sikay mag soesoeloed . , atchu-ay kay da. Ha walo kay da buok.

A: Uh, atchu-ay da! Hapila na sa edad no iman?

B: Sa edad ko, baynte dos.

A. Baynte dos. Inu sa pigbuhat no iman? Panginabuhian no?

B: Panginabuhian ko iman, tagtrabaho a diya ta Malaybalay Stock Farm para ho … pag … makabulig ho pagpaeskwela taina mga atubay ko.

The recording is of an ordinary use of Binukid. In retrospect, it did seem clearer that in the earlier rounds the class had quickly established the general language situation—someone was introducing himself—and was only struggling to fill in details. When the transcript was provided, a completion of many such details took place, with a clearer admission as well that some gaps could not be filled.

To check actual comprehension, the students were asked to summarize what was said in the recording. A number did so by attempting translations.

What is interesting is that they translated first into Bisaya and into Pilipino, and only later into English. Their translations were quite acceptable. The teacher’s translation was unnecessary.

To the students therefore, the recording was quite intelligible even at first contact with the language. That has got to be the first and most important note. Had they not arrived at the degree of understanding they did, the rest of the exercise would have fallen flat. It is even more important for what it suggests at some higher plane.

Many people in urban Mindanao know two or three native Philippine languages—say, Bisaya, Ilongo, and Pilipino. Not that many may be aware that all of Mindanao’s tribal languages belong to the same family as these three languages. A little thinking might help them realize that by far the most frequent use of tribal languages of Mindanao has got to be ordinary, day-to-day conversational and common situations. Therefore, certain would-be fieldworkers from the mainstream lowland culture might be surprised to find that, even during their very first experience of, say, Matigsalug or Mamanwa or Talaandig or Tagakaolo, the tribal language is not at all unintelligible.

An expanded next-edition of this exercise—to include an additional recording or two, at higher degree of difficulty, of a different language genre, from some other indigenous Mindanao groups, but selected to maintain the first-contact condition—might be a good idea.

II

For the next part of the exercise, each member of the class was given two lists. One was for all the words used in the recording and in the sequence these were used. The second was for the same words but in alphabetical sequence. This latter would show which words were used more than once. .Everyone was instructed, among a few others, to put checks beside words whose meaning they knew or understood, and then to identify to which part of speech the marked words belong.

A not-so-random sampling here might give the reader some idea of the intervening individual work. Someone realized aloud that several words had a clear Spanish flavor—pobre was immediately given as an example and identified as an adjective. One laughed at the way baynte was spelled; two repeated the way baynte dos was actually pronounced by the main speaker. A third was concerned with whether numbers are nouns or adjectives. Another pointed out that the root word in tagtrabaho and pagpaeskwela would count as Spanish. Still another noted that the sige in the recording seemed to have a different meaning from what he remembered of college Spanish. When a lady shared that she had twenty-four units of Spanish during her college days, a gentleman observed that revealed her edad.

The class eventually moved on to the counting. From the first list, the transcript has 119 individual words and word-like units. To everyone in the class, one of these (pag) was merely the beginning of a word the speaker did not complete. Hence, there are only 118 “real” words in the text. Starting from the second list, “real” words used more than once were each counted only once. Such elimination yielded a third list of only seventy six distinct words. Of these, four were readily identified as interjections.- Another sixteen, either alone or along with others, are place names or personal names, and all were identified as such. Going by the check marks, these proper nouns were considered by the students something “known” and “understood.” That accounting left fifty-six other distinct words. Of these remaining fifty-six, anywhere from twenty-seven to thirty-one were “known” and “understood” by individual students. Or so they said.

The arithmetic was routine (though apparently unworthy of graduate students’ least exertion). Based on the marks on the first list, the students in effect indicated they knew and understood from 48 percent to 57 percent of the words. Based on the third list, the one that drops the one incomplete word and the all-too-easy interjections and proper names, the percentages were from 51 percent to 59 percent. When the proper nouns and interjections are counted in (as in the second list)—”Proper nouns and interjections are part of the language, no?”—the statistics rise to from 63 percent to 66 percent.

The probable inaccuracies notwithstanding, these numbers surprised even those who were minimally intellectually engaging in the exercise. This was a first contact with Binukid, albeit ordinary Binukid and with the benefit of digital playback plus a read-at-will transcript. Even if the objections are allowed their worst, the fact survives all damage: The students were genuinely surprised at their high degree of lexical familiarity with the ordinary Pulangiyen Binukid they heard. That is the second note.

Again, it suggests a highly specialized job. There shall have to be some other time for a more rigorous, more systematic check of the lexical overlap of various dialectal variants of Binukid with each other, with the neighboring languages, and with Bisaya, Ilongo, and Tagalog, even if done only as a priest’s general hobby. More importantly, this second note is part of the explanation for the first: No wonder they understood the recording!

In that light, the best students in the class asked two correct follow-through questions: “Language is more than just the vocabulary, no?” and “Father, perhaps you can train us on some fieldwork-relevant techniques so we can pick up a lot more on indigenous languages and do so faster?” These led, of course, to the main input items for the session.

Before closing this section, two little questions during the word-lists portion can illustrate the third note. The first was asked by one of the better students (who also observed that the shortest words were the ones most frequently used). It concerned the si, hi and sa, among others. She and a few others could correctly give Bisaya and Pilipino equivalents for these words, and yet could not quite pin down their meaning. More importantly, she could not honestly declare these to be prepositions or conjunctions or interjection; these obviously were not verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, or pronouns.

She has every right to be confused as to the part of speech. That is so because the three words do not belong to any of the eight parts of speech with which Filipino students are familiar from English. no meaning, but The three are, in fact, case marker particles. They  perform crucially important grammatical functions. In the actual text, si is a marker for proper names in the subject case, while hi for proper names in the object case and sa for common nouns in the subject case. Their removal from the sentences where they are found might occasion a gentle correction from a native Pulangiyen Binukid user. Interchanging the si and hi in some of them leads to odd sentences.

The other question was of a similar vein. Someone else noted that the ba and the kuan were the same words used in Ilongo and Bisaya. Her question though was to which part of speech these belong. Because she was not sure, she did not put check marks beside these words in her lists. Again, she did well to not raise a question about the meaning, for likewise these words do not have any real meaning by themselves. Rather, their meaning is in their use, which is to introduce a tone, a mood, or a quality. They are discourse particles, a species in the same genus as the case marker particles. The genus in turn thrives in abundance in Philippine languages.

Aside from indicating a hesitation or a temporary forgetting of some word, the kuan has a unique property. It can be subjected to the usual morphing by means of prefixes, suffixes, infixes, duplications. “Kuan was . . . kuan-ized at the . . . kuan” is the silly-sounding translation of an acceptable sentence in many Philippine languages. The sentence is perfectly understandable to a listener with whom a discourse context has already been established—that is, where speaker and listener already know or can assume they are talking about a certain person, dealing with some specific action done to that person, and referring to a specific location or event.

Together, the two questions suggest that the better students were already groping for something beyond vocabulary, possibly being drawn slightly into the realm of grammar, syntax, and discourse. They encountered a category of words which they could not easily handle using what they knew well from their English grammar classes. Happily, they also used them as language models they y implicit mastered from their general learning of Bisaya, Ilongo, 1 Ilongo, and Pilipino.

There is something here which is underappreciated or unexamined. That is the third note.

III

Some things embedded in the recording could have been useful in the subsequent sessions of the course. A shift to first-person is best as I put down on paper a couple of them.

One concerns names. Sonny Boy Talasan mentioned his grandfather, Datu Mandublas. In 1993, I asked several Nabawang adults what his “real” name was. None of them denied me that datum—Celestino Ampildon—but nobody ever referred to or called him by that name. In a particularity that cannot be missed, I was also made to understand that it is not good to speak the full name or even just the first name of older relatives. Indeed, the culture socializes its young to a non-use and eventual forgetting of the first names of their elders. I had had to learn to distinguish between social settings when I could and when I should not ask young persons for the names of their parents.

More important for my own further education, Sonny Boy Talasan’s incidental mention of “Datu Kunog-kunog” gives me a fourth name for his grandfather. It was in fact the first time that I have ever heard of it. When I commented so, the kibitzers during the recording all smiled. One pointed out that when a man becomes a datu, he is given another name. In Mandublas’s case, it was “Datu Kunog-kunog.” Many adults in the village apparently know it but rarely use it. Instead, Nabawang adults today use “Array’—amay is the Pulangiyen word for father, inay for mother. He stands indeed at the head of by far the largest kin group in Nabawang today.

Thanks to another part of the same recording, there may be a fifth name for his grandfather. The “Man-iluyan” and “Nay-iluyan” in the recording certainly elicited an alertness question from me. My teachers in the village explained that when a man and a woman are wed, they are given new names. There is no shortage of illustrative examples they could give. So, when Celestino Ampildon and Angelina Loquindo were wed, they would have been given new names? Naturally! However, nobody in Nabawang today seems to recall what these were. Nobody knows what he was more commonly called during his bachelor days. Nobody in Nabawang today can name—by whichever naming system—any of this datu’s siblings or cousins, if he had any at all, in whichever nearby or far away villages they may be found.

As in many other places in Southeast Asia, teknonymy is practiced by the Pulangiyen, specifically in connection with the eldest child. When Sonny Boy was given his name soon after his birth, his parents began being called “Man-Sonny-Boy” (or “Array-Sonny-Boy”) and “Inay-Sonny-Boy” (or the shortened “Nay-Sonny-Boy”). Every other parent in Nabawang has some similar name; those who had a child by a formal remarriage receive additional such names. Over the course of many weekend visits to Nabawang since April of 2011, I have also heard “Papa-Sonny-Boy” and “Mama-Sonny-Boy” used to refer to or directly address Nestor and Susan. For his part, Celestino Ampildon became “Mandublas” when his eldest, a son, was given a name. The data is also “Amay-Duglas” and how the “g” became a “b” is another story waiting to be told.

Sonny Boy’s use of “Man-iluyan” and “Nay-iluyan” is also interesting for the avoidance of the more commonly used “Man-Sonny-Boy” and “Inay-Sonny-Boy.” He and his siblings have never used these latter two terms in my hearing. Yet I have heard all eight siblings use the teknonyms for other parents in the community. The parallel situation I have observed in other children and youth with respect to their own parents and other parents in the community. I have heard mothers and fathers use teknonyms to address each other. Surely these are still facets of the actual use of Pulangiyen kinship-linked terms.

All of the above would seem so far removed from more critical and immediate concerns of the mission to the indigenous peoples. We Jesuits, however, know that the matter is part of seeking to find God already at work and at play in every part of creation, human languages and cultures included. In finding God, we praise and celebrate God, and pray we may be found worthy of the sharing in the suffering as well.

A second concerns culture contact and change. At the time of the recording, Sonny Boy was on a short leave from the Malaybalay Stock Farm so he could be in Nabawang. He had accepted to be the Commencement Speaker at the grade school graduation ceremonies in the neighboring village.

He had graduated from the same school. His teachers there were happy and proud of him, in part because he had a college degree.

Time was when Pulangiyen elders did not look kindly at the idea of allowing their children to go to school. Back in 1993-1995, many older people in the territory—Datu Mandublas included—in fact expressed to me a generalized evaluation of schools being bad for their culture, destructive even. This, even if, on some other occasion, many also expressed they valued literacy. As best as I could make sense of the matter, it was not schools per se that the elders found problematic. Rather, going to school meant constant contact with the non-Pulangiyen, in the process giving the young all sorts of ideas. One major underlying anathematic was the challenge to the authority of elders and the accustomed ways, not in the least in connection with boy-girl relationships and control of marriages.

None of Datu Mandublas’s generation ever went to elementary school, for there were no grade schools yet in the territory when they were little children. In time, the schools were set up. Within the childhood of his nine offspring’s, the resistance to schooling must have begun to meltdown. At least two of the datu’s older sons apparently never went to school. On the other hand, the three youngest apparently did. Of these three, only the youngest daughter, Susan, finished elementary school.

She went on to high school.That high school was about thirty kilometers away, at the center of the town to the south of Nabawang. It was set up by an Italian Jesuit missionary who, after so many tries, finally convinced Datu Mandublas to allow his youngest daughter to attend high school. The priest paid for her school fees and allowed her free board and lodging at the dormitory he built for the tribal students. For some reason or other, she stopped after a year. Even so, Susan is the first Nabawang native to have ever had some high school education.

Susan’s children are part of the story. As of this writing, the youngest had just completed a year at the village pre-school. Susan and Nestor intend to send this youngest one to formal grade school this coming school year, no matter that the nearest school is about three kilometers away. Of the seven older children, the youngest two are still in grade school and one more in high school. The parents also intend to keep these three in school for the coming school year.

The four oldest children have completed high school.6 All four have been to college. The fourth stopped after a year, primarily due to lack of funds; she went to Cagayan de Oro City to find a job but still hopes to resume her college in the near future. The second oldest is still in college, and the parents intend to’ let him continue this coming school year. The third eldest received a BS Education degree in March 2013. The eldest, Sonny Boy, had his BS Agriculture in March 2011. He is the first Nabawang resident ever to finish college.

Datu Mandublas died in 1996. He would be happy, I think, that despite nine years of schooling and then a job in overwhelmingly Bisaya-speaking communities, Sonny Boy considers himself to be inteoloek to Pulangiyen.

Language and Education: Colonial Legacy and the National Imperative

In pre-contact Philippines, there was no language problem. Our ancestors used their respective languages in transmitting their skills, knowledge, and wisdom to the young. Each community was unified in language and worldview.

Spanish colonial rule changed this situation radically. The Spaniards used a dual language policy in line with the objectives of their colonial project: to Hispanize and Christianize the natives.

Up until the 1890s in, Davao, the Spanish priests tried to master the different local languages to facilitate the Christianization of the natives of Davao. I still have to determine up to what level the different languages were used in the schools, but for higher education, the language used was Spanish.

Observation: If the aim was to Christianize. the natives, the native languages were used. If the aim was to Hispanize the natives, Spanish was used.

In 1888, the Spanish Governor General Valeriano Weyler decreed that starting that year, only Spanish would be used in all educational institutions throughout the islands.

Observation: Whoever has the power dictates what language to use in the schools.

We know the result of Spanish colonial education. The educated Filipinos became fluent in Spanish. Rizal wrote his masterpieces in Spanish. The educated Filipinos wanted to become Spaniards but to the Spaniards, they were nothing but indios, even if they were Hispanized indios.

When the Americans came, they also problematized the use of language in education as they implemented a universal public school system. The first teachers were the American soldiers, and naturally they used English in teaching the children. The children simply gaped at the soldiers as they could not understand English.

Said Tasker Bliss, the Governor of the Moro Province, on the use of English in schools in 1906:

Unless the American teacher learns the native dialect, the native must learn English in order that through it he may acquire our ideas. In the imparting of these ideas to native children, neither he nor they should be hampered by requiring that the ideas should be conveyed through the medium of English.

Bliss understood how difficult it was to teach students using a foreign language, but ultimately, English triumphed. The overall colonial project was more important than the practical goals of Bliss in the choice not only of the language to use in our schools, but also the content of our education.

As happened during the Spanish colonial period, the natives who were educated during the American colonial period became Americans or dreamed of becoming Americans.

In our history, foreigners have always dictated what language to use in our schools and what to teach us.

Those old enough among us would have experienced being taught Japanese in school during the Japanese period. The Japanese also wanted to make us Japanese, but they lost in the war against the Americans, ans so English has prevailed in our schools.

There are two points that struck me from our experiences in education.

The first point is that a person learns faster when his own language is used in teaching. Even our colonizers recognized this. The Spanish priests used the native languages to Christianize us. Even today, Protestant sects use the native languages in evangelization because they can easily be understood by their targets of evangelization.

All advances educators, and I suppose, all philosophies of education and all theories of learning, agree that a person learns best in his own language.

This principle of teaching and learning is applied in all advanced countries. The British and Americans use English, the French use French, the Germans, German, the Japanese, Japanese, the Russian, Russian, and the Pinoys. . .

Well, we are not advanced country. Like other former colonized countries that remain backward and poor, we Pinoys do not use our own languages in our schools. We do not apply the principle that a student learns best if he is taught in his own language.

Let me quote Tasked Bliss again on the use of English in our schools in 1906:
Even among Filipino schools taught in English by a native teacher, the visitor must be impressed by the enormous waste or time in teaching children the essential things, a knowledge of which is needed by them at once. . . Instead of immediately communicating the ideas to his pupils in a language common to both, (the teacher) wastes years of their time and his in attempting to get ideas into their heads through a language which is foreign to both of them. . .

Why is it that we are not applying this important teaching and learning principle like what the advanced educators in advanced countries are doing?

That will be answered by the second point I have learned from our history. The aim of our education does not match the principle of teaching and learning. That is so because ever since we were colonized, the aim of our education had been dictated by our colonizers.

Our colonizers did not care about any principle of teaching and learning. What the Spaniards wanted was to make us Spaniards, second class Americans, and second class Japanese. Third class, even.

It is clear that colonial education was made to serve the general aims and policies of the colonial projects of our colonizers. In the case of the Americans, education was made a part of the counter insurgency campaign. According to Major John Parker, the education work fo eighteen American soldiers he had hired to teach in Laguna was more important than their traditional soldiering task. He believed that his wife who ran a school “tranquilized the country more ‘than a thousand men.'”

In short, the aim of colonial education implemented by the American was to make us little brown Americans. They needed civil servants to help run the colonial administration; they needed junior partners in the colonial economy; and they needed submissive and obedient colonial subjects.

The Americans succeeded completely in their colonial project and educational project. Up to now, we have not thrown into Bankerohan River the colonial educational system that was implanted by the Americans. Up to now, the content of our education and the language we are using are still colonial. And so, look at our situation as a country. Poverty and underdevelopment are the continuing effects of our still under colonized society.

We have to understand that a colonial project is a brutal and violent project of subjugation and exploitation. In the history of mankind, there has never been a case of colonizers wishing to improve their target of colonization. The colonizers advance all justifications for their colonization projects, but the essential objectives of colonization are to exploit other communities and their resources. In order to achieve these aims, the colonizers will use both coercive and persuasive means.

During the first years of American rule, the Filipinos had deep hatred for the Americans. The atrocities of the Americans were still fresh in the minds of the people who experienced hamleting, torture, huwes de kutsilyo, germ warfare, and other vicious means to make us their colony. And so in 1905, nine out of ten Filipinos wanted to kick the Americans out of the Philippines. But in just a generation of tranquilizing the Filipino children through the public schools, the attitudes of the Filipinos changed. How many Filipinos now want to become Americans?

Aside from winning our hearts and minds, the educational system implanted by the Americans also deepened the splits in our society. Already split vertically by ethnoliguistic differences, we were split further with the emergence of an elite within each community whose members were good in English and who became divorced from their fellow community members.

Education played a key role int he horizontal split in our society. The gap widened between the educated elite and the common people so that even if they come from the same tribe, they no longer understand each other. They have become two different people speaking two different languages. The elite who make up the political, economic, cultural, and literary leaders of the country have abandoned their respective communities. Do we still wonder why our country is in such a mess?

The Americans boast that the educational system is their most important contribution to the Philippines. The truth is that this educational system is the most vicious legacy of American colonialism.

It should already be thrown in to Bankerohan River, but our leaders themselves want to retain it, especially the use of English in our schools. Even if all theories of teaching and learning attest to the truism that one’s own language is the most effective means of teaching and learning, our educational system still has not adopted it.

The ideal graduate is still the one who speaks good English. The better the English, the better the graduate. The one who uses his own language is baduy. In school, you will be fined if you speak your own language. Your own tongue has no place in national conferences. Even the meetings of the remotest barangay councils must be conducted in English, no matter how tortured it is.

Why still English still dominant in our schools today?

Pro-English advocates advance many reasons. But in my view, the basic reason is mental inertia. Or as others put it, mental colony. It is difficult to change what one has become accustomed to. What the Americans had implanted in our brains is difficult to uproot, especially  as we failed to physically kick them out of our country.

That is also  the experience of other countries that underwent colonization. For example, why do we elite of Mozambique, Angola, and Timor Leste insist on using Portuguese as one of their national languages? Portuguese has no bearing at all in international affairs. Why not English? Because they are used to Portuguese. Their elite find it difficult to free themselves from the culture that shaped them, even as they struggled to kick out the Portuguese.

That is also the situation of Senegal. They want French, as they are used to it. I do not know what other sophisticated and weighty arguments the elites there advance to retain the language of their former colonial masters, but here in the Philippines we are familiar with the arguments of the pro-English advocated. Their discourse favoring English still dominated today. Let us discuss the more important ones.

English is the international language and therefore we must learn it. I have no objection to this statement. But does it mean we should throw our own language into Bangkerohan River? I have no problem at all with learning English, but make it the medium of instruction in our schools?

Some say that to be world class, our “graduates should be able to write, speak, and understand English.” It is only Filipinos who believe it. World class Japanese, French, Koreans, Germans, Russians, and even Americans sneer at the idea.

Some of our officials worry that were falling behind in many fields compared to our neighbor countries. They blame this situation to the low quality of English. And so government will now strictly implement the use of English in our schools. This argument has no logical basis. For over one hundred years we have been the best in English in the Far East. We simply drub Japan, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, Malaysia, and others as far as English is concerned.

These countries are ugok in English. Their people even come here to learn English. But why do they drub us in terms of industrialization and development? We should understand that there is no relation at all between fluency in English and a country’s development.

In his article,” Why  the Crisis in Education,” former Education Secretary Florencio B. Abad blamed our “poor English reading skills” for our dismissal performance in science and mathematics tests compared to our Asian neighbors. According to him, fluency in English is correlated with science and mathematics skills.

The conclusion: If you are ugok in Math, master English! Only in the Philippines. Try teaching math to the Japanese using English. They’d become as ugok as we are if they will follow our system.

As Bliss had commented in 1906, so much time is wasted in learning English so that we will learn math and other skills and ideas.

We should understand that there is no relationship between your math skills and your English skills. It is only partially applicable in the Philippines because English is our medium of instruction. In other countries, this view is totally ridiculous.

The Catanduanes States Colleges (CSC) was recently featured in a newspaper because it produces many board topnotchers in civil engineering, geodetic engineering, and even in nursing and midwifery. According to its Dean of Engineering, Charlie Hobi, twenty-five percent of their lectures are done in the local language. Said he:

If they (the students) cannot grasp a concept in English, we say it in Tagalog. If the still do not understand, we use Bicol.

I am willing to bet that if they use more Bicol in teaching, their students will become brighter. Of course, the test should also be in Bicol.

We must throw into Bankerohan River the use of English in our schools. We like to boast that we are very good in English, but nobody envies us. Nobody wants ro compete with us in English. Nobody wants to copy our educational system. The development of our industry and the increase in our productivity have nothing to do with our excellence in English. To borrow from Nora Aunor, “Walang himala sa Ingles.”

Let us not allow the horizontal split in our society to persist. A country wherein the language used in school is different from the language used at home has no business becoming a country. It is only doomed to underdevelopment. Look at our country.

The national imperative is to develop an educational system that truly answers our own needs as a nation. We should not allow foreigners or foreign thinking to decide our education.

This new educational system should use our own languages as sensible educators do. Today, some people still do not understand how important this matter is. Let us discuss some of the important objections to the use of our own languages.

First, the use of the different languages will prevent our unity as a people; second, our languages are not ripe for academic and intellectual discourse; and third, we are not prepared to use them because we lack teachers, book, etc.

For good or for ill, we were born as a country with many languages. Our leaders wracked their brains in unifying us. And their solution? Add three more languages! Our first Constitution declared that Spanish, English and Pilipino would become our official languages. Is it not funny that we should make foreign languages our national languages? As I have argued, this was due to force of habit. The frames of our Constitution were good speakers in Spanish and English.

They also made Pilipino, which is based on Tagalog, as another national language. This was supposed to be developed by borrowing from the other local languages to make it truly national. Having one national language would unify us, so  the argument goes. But this argument is negated by the fact that two other languages,and foreign at that, were made as our official languages.

Instead of unifying us, Pilipino has only worsened our division because everybody knows that it is Tagalog masquerading itself as Pilipino. Even if it has now a new label of Filipino, and has borrowed extensively from other languages, it remains essentially Tagalog. The Bisdak will simply not allow Bisaya to be replaced by another tongue. In reality, there are more Bisayans than Tagalogs.

We will only reap trouble if we privilege one language and reduce the others into second class languages. We should be fair to all. Therefore, we should use our own languages in our schools. The Ilocanos use Ilocano, the Bicols use Bicol, the Ilonngos, Ilongo, Magindanaw, Magindanaw, etc.

We should not force ourselves to speak only one language. We can achieve unity by disrespecting each other’s language, practicing equality, and striving towards a common national goal of development. If we use our own languages, it is easier to want to learn other languages.

Some ague that our languages are not developed for academic and intellectual discourse. Don’t we lack terms? My answer is another question. Was there a language that emerged fully mature? The English of today is very different from the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Why did English “mature?” Because it was used by the whole people. English was originally the tongue of the poor and the unwashed. Their ruling elite spoke French or Latin. Up until the 17th century, the “language of Scholarship” was Latin. But when the English elite threw Latin into Thames River, English became a powerful language.

That was also the case with the German language. It was also considered an inferior language. But because of the efforts of intellectuals and writers like Herder and Goethe who threw Latin into Rhine River, German developed. The Finnish language also developed when the Finnish intellectuals and educators led by Elias Lonnrot decided to use the language of their peasants, servants, and workers, and throw the Swedish and Russian languages, the languages of their colonizers, into Nokia River.

We should not be daunted by the so-called lack of intellectual philosophical, scientific, and other terms in our languages today. It is a very simple problem. All we do is just borrow or coin words, or revive old words to express new meanings. Eighty percent fo the English vocabulary today comes from foreign sources. Tagalog is developing very fast because of the liberal infusion of other words and experimentation with spelling. That is how a language develops. We should expect heated debates about what is right or wrong usage. But in the end, the people will decide what to use and what to throw into Bangkerohan River.

If we are convinced of the necessity and advantages of using our own languages, then implementing a step-by-step language shift program in our educational system becomes easy, especially for the major languages like Ilocano, Ilongo,, Bisaya, Kapampangan, Tausug, etc.

Let us create committees on translation, committees on textbook development, committees on teacher training, etc. Let us begin the language shift from Grade One, progressing into Grade Two, and so on as the various components of the program do their work. By the time, the first batch of students taught in the local languages reaches college, books in the various disciplined and trained teachers should be ready. There will be problems along the way, but long-term planning will solve many of the kinks.

I will bet again that our graduates who of through a teaching-learning environment using our own languages will be brighter, more skilled, more nationalistic, and more motivated to develop our country.

For so long, American colonial education has tranquilized our minds. Until now, it has continued to divide our communities, our intellectuals and academics disdaining to talking in their own languages – in the languages of their peasants and workers. When are we going to return to our own people and restore the oneness of our communities? When are we going to throw English into Bankerohan River?

Language, Power, and Defining the Filipino Soul

I had written a paper on the process that led Jesuits finally to adopt English as the medium of instruction in their schools, primarily the Ateneo de Manila and later the seminaries entrusted by the bishops to their care. For fear however that I might bore you with details on the intramural struggles regarding language among the Jesuits, I decided that probably the best way of drawing some fruit from my labors as a student of history is to do the following: First, to summarize in a concise way what I think are some data brought to light by historical research into this Jesuit process; second, to raise some questions about the relationship between language and identity given a particular reading of our context today; and third, to present a tentative framework regarding this relationship given today’s globalizing world.

Background on Jesuit educational work in the Philippines

The shift from Spanish to American sovereignty in the Philippines produced radical changes on various levels of life.’ These changes were all in the service of a policy of Americanization of Philippine society. The strict political demarcation of Church and State dictated by American constitutional principles spelled the demise of the patronato real as the legal-canonical arrangement governing Church-State relations during the Spanish regime.’ This meant that public funds could no longer be used for Church-based and Church-sponsored activities. Thus in the realm of education for example, the Church had to fend for itself. Where the Jesuits were concerned, the Eskwela Normal Superior had to cease operations as a state-financed teacher-training institute and the Ateneo municipal de Manila had to drop its appellation of “municipal” and transform itself into a private school.

The American regime drew up a plan for a public school system to replace the one systematically instituted under the Spaniards in the 1860s. The plan covered the whole range of education, from the primary to the university level. Implementation of this plan involved the use of English as medium of instruction. Though Spanish continued to be used in government, particularly in court proceedings, the trend clearly was toward supplanting the language of Calderon with the language of Shakespeare. Much better able to adapt to and live under this radically changed situation were the new religious congregations invited to work in the country. In the first decade of the twentieth century alone, Irish Redemptorists, Dutch Mill Hill Missionaries, Belgian Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (CICM) Fathers, Dutch Sacred Heart Fathers, and the German Divine Word Missionaries (SVD) entered the country and in time would spread out to the rest of the archipelago. Women religious congregations predated and accompanied these men religious congregations. Aside from the contemplative nuns of Santa Clara, the Beaterio de Santa Catalina, the Beaterio de la Compania de Jesus (which would become the Religious of the Virgin Mary or RVM Sisters), and, somewhat later, the Recoleto-directed Beaterio would become active in the educational apostolate. Joining them were the new European women congregations: The Daughters of Charity in 1862, the Augustinian Sisters in 1883, and the French Assumption Sisters in 1892. During the American regime, the following arrived in the Philippines: The St. Paul de Chartres Sisters in 1904, the Benedictine Sisters in 1906, the Immaculate Heart of Mary (ICM) Sisters in 1910, the Holy Spirit Sisters, the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, and the Good Shepherd Sisters in 1912.

Church-related educational institutions connected to the older religious orders for men would take quite some time to adopt English as medium of instruction. The Ateneo de Manila would do so definitively only in 1921 and the University of Santo Tomas in 1923. Various reasons could be given for this delay: Some reasons were due to the internal conditions in which the religious orders found themselves; other reasons were due to a lingering doubt with regard to American political intentions in the Philippines, at least until the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century when the passing of the Jones Bill clarified American intentions.

Briefly, the questions then in people’s minds had to do with the duration of American colonial rule. Was independence imminent? Was it to be long in coming? If so, how long? If the Americans were to give up the Philippines in a few years, say in five to ten years, would it make sense for Church-based educational institutions to shift to English? I make the claim that these questions had pragmatic import. Spanish had been the lingra franca of the islands for three centuries; English for merely a decade. If the Americans were to leave, would English then survive? The Americans of course would stay on for more than three decades, but this was hardly obvious in the first half of the second decade of American colonial rule in the Philippines. Besides, Filipino elite rhetoric then was full of agitation for independence at the earliest possible time. The decision to shift from Spanish to English as medium of instruction in the schools was first and foremost a political issue tied to colonial rule.

In general, it must be noted that the Catholic Church that survived the Philippine Revolution, the Spanish-American War, and the Filipino-American War was a beleaguered Church, assailed on all sides by various threats, both real and imaginary. Real however were the following: First, there was the challenge posed by an aggressively proselytizing and logistically superior Protestantism making its new presence absolutely felt in the country. Second, there was the schism initiated by Gregorio Aglipay and companions; the Iglesia Filipina Independiente claimed at least a fourth of the Catholic population as its membership in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Third, there was the enmity of anti-clerical and anti-Catholic elements, mostly members of the Filipino elite, who were out politically and socially to discredit the Church and to exploit its weakened public position.

Specific observations regarding Jesuit educational work

The Jesuits were royally expelled from Spain and all Spanish dominions in 1767. The Jesuits of the Philippines received their marching orders in 1768 and, in the next two years, they were shipped in several groups to exile in the Papal States in Italy. In a papal bull, Pope Clement XIV would then suppress the Society of Jesus in 1773. Restored worldwide by a papal fiat of Pope Pius VII in 1814, the Spanish Jesuits returned to the Philippines in 1859 after almost a century of absence. Their primary mission was the evangelization of Mindanao, then targeted by the Spanish colonial regime for economic development and political consolidation. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Spanish Jesuits who composed the Philippine Mission of the Province of Aragon had charge of the whole island of Mindanao, except for a few places still under the Augustinian Recollects and those given to the Benedictine order. They also had two schools in Manila, the Ateneo municipal de Manila and the Escuela Normal Superior. A source of pride was the Observatorio de Manila.

At least initially, the Spanish Jesuits were in principle not opposed to the adoption of English as medium of instruction in their schools. There is a charming picture of Spanish Jesuits gathered in the courtyard of the Ateneo municipal de Manila in 1899; they are portrayed as going . through a crash course on the English language. It is difficult not to see in this exercise a refreshing optimism about the future. In fact, Father-Francisco Javier Simo, one of the Jesuit professors at the Ateneo, was commissioned by his superiors to write a textbook on English grammar in 1900. The book was never published, much to the consternation of its author, who began to suspect that superiors had changed their attitudes toward the English language. However, due to problems of teaching staff and lack of expertise, the Spanish Jesuits never did feel equipped to make the shift from Spanish to English. True nonetheless was a lingering nostalgia for the Spanish past, an ironclad but ultimately reductionist identification between the Catholic faith and the Spanish language, and an emotional attachment to their own national identity.

After the shift of sovereignty from Spanish to American hands, a sprinkling of American Jesuits would find their way to the Philippines. Their primary task was to help the Philippine Mission in its dealings with organs of the American colonial regime. Initially, they were also supposed to minister to the pastoral needs of American Catholics in Manila. Some of them would help out in the Manila Observatory, one of only two Jesuit works that the American colonial regime financed.’ The presence of these American Jesuits was ad hoc in nature; however, it was becoming clearer by the year that the Spanish Jesuits, after it became apparent that American colonial presence was going to continue indefinitely, could no longer respond to the situation.

To make a rather long and complex story short, the Jesuit Superior General in Rome, Father Wlodzimierz Ledochowski, decreed a change: Spanish Jesuits of the Philippine Mission were to move to the Bombay Mission to take over the work of the German Jesuits who had been expelled from India by the British during World War I. American Jesuits of the Maryland-New York Province were to take over the Philippine Mission from the Spanish Jesuits of the Aragon Province. The first big group of American Jesuits arrived in 1921. They were given the Ateneo de Manila and the Colegio-Seminario de Vigan to run. This Year marked the official change of Spanish to English as medium of instruction. In 1926, the American Jesuits took official and definitive control of the Philippine Mission when the first American Jesuit in the person of James Carlin, then Rector of the Ateneo de Manila, was named Mission Superior. In general, it must be said that the American Jesuits were as committed as any other American in the Philippines to the process of Americanization that the American colonial regime had set for the Archipelago.

When Horacio de la Costa was still a Jesuit scholastic in his early twenties, he wrote a book on the history of the Jesuits in the Philippines from 1859 to the decade just before World War I. The book Light Cavalry, a delightful read even if already somewhat dated, takes pains to show that the Spanish Jesuits did all that was possible to them to teach English to their students. He quotes at length the Spanish Jesuit Father Juan Villalonga’s instructions on the teaching of English from the elementary grades to high school. Nevertheless, he also says that the use of English as medium of instruction would find its effective place only when the American Jesuits finally arrived to take over the Ateneo dc Manila.

In time, the American Jesuits would also set up schools in various places in the Philippines, schools that, in the course of time, would evolve into the four Jesuit universities in Mindanao and the Bicol region today. Two other Jesuit schools, the Ateneo de Tuguegarao and the Ateneo de San Pablo, would not prosper because of difficulties experienced with the ecclesiastical authorities in those places during their incumbency.

When Filipino Jesuits took over the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus in the post-World War II period, the various Jesuit Ateneos remained committed to English as medium of instruction. Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s, a reawakened nationalist consciousness among students and faculty called for the Filipinization of education. We cannot go into the details of this quite recent phenomenon. Suffice it to say that, at least in the Ateneo de Manila, the move to Filipinization took place in the area of the Humanities. Two exemplars of this move come to mind: Now deceased national artist Rolando Tinio in the Pilipino Department and the Jesuit Roque Ferriols in Philosophy.

Today, English continues to be the primary medium of instruction in all Jesuit educational institutions. In a globalizing world, the call has been for the strengthening of this commitment to English. In the institution where I teach, the Loyola School of Theology, plans are being drawn for making the school the center of theological education for Jesuit scholastics coming from the diverse regions of East Asia and Oceania. Already we have scholastics from as .far as Sri Lanka studying with us. In the near future, Jesuit scholastics from as diverse countries in Asia as East Timor, Myanmar, Vietnam, and South Korea will be coming to our part of the world to study theology. Only one language is deemed necessary and useful for this enterprise: The English language.

Language and identity: Some questions

In my reading of historical texts about the shift from Spanish to English as medium of instruction in Jesuit schools, one inescapable question continues to play in my mind: What view of language was consciously or unconsciously operative in all the discussions and debates about shifting from one to the other language? A preliminary answer given by an analysis of the sources is that language was fundamentally construed as an instrument of what Glenn May (1980) terms as social engineering. Perhaps a better term would be cultural engineering given that the Americanization process was concerned to change not only the political, economic, and social structures, but also the cultural values deemed necessary to underpin those structures. In any case, the question remains relevant today: What view of language is operative in our promotion of English today?

How effective has been this instrumental view of language in the social and cultural engineering of our history? In his book Amon and rerobaion. Rey Ileto (1979) describes the differences in the perception of the revolution by two groups of Filipinos: The Spanish-educated and Spanish-speaking ilustrados like Rizal and the Tagalog masses whose worldview was shaped by the Tagalog pillion texts of that time. The dissonance in the reading and interpretation of the signs of the times between the elite and the masses has its contemporary analogues. The most obvious example I can give now for this contemporary dissonance is our estimation of the Erap presidency.

If this view of language as an instrument of social and cultural engineering is what is operative then and now, what are its implications for the development of a Filipino identity? In a post-Wittgensteinian and post-Heideggerian age, when language is viewed not so much as instrument but as the “house of being,” as defining who we are and as constitutive of living in a world, could English (or Spanish or any other foreign language for that matter) carry the burden of defining the Filipino soul, of explicating Filipino identity? Can the English language understood as instrument be transformed into a language as an authentic matrix of Filipino meanings and values? Or arc we cast into a dramatic performance in which, depending on the role to be played, we are called at one point to use one language for some pragmatic purpose and then called at another point just to be, to live, to exist in the other language? Is it possible to live in a world that is constantly in need of being translated from one language to the other? Vicente Rafael (1993), in his book Contracting colonialism, deconstructs conventional readings of Philippine history and weaves a tale of constant negotiations of our identity through linguistic strategies of evasion and domestication of what is foreign. Or do we now have Filipinos for whom English has in fact ceased to be an instrument but has become a matrix of meanings and values for their own lives?

The American Jesuits shifted to English as medium of instruction in all their Ateneo schools in the Philippines. English was of course their own world-constituting language. They lived in the world made possible by that language and by the traditions it carried. Filipinos learned the English language however as an instrument, and as such it required a constant negotiation of their identity through translation. Could it be that the never-ending translations Filipinos had to engage in have produced some changes in that same identity? What does it mean therefore for a Filipino to live in a constantly translated world? Could the pathologies of the national character be attributed precisely to the ever-shifting linguistic grounds on which we are required to stand?

A reflection on how language locates Filipino identity today

It seems to me that it is becoming more and more typical of Filipinos to be multilingual. I speak Taosug whenever I find myself among family members in Zamboanga. In my religious community at Loyola I louse of Studies, I converse in Tagalog. And every Sunday when I have to preside at mass in NIontalban or Pansol or Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Mandaluyong, I deliver my homily also in Tagalog. But when 1 email foreign-born friends abroad, I use English or Italian. I have cousins whose mother tongue is the Samal language. I have other cousins whose primary language is Cebuano or Ilocano.

Whatever the conditions of relative isolation in which our ancestors found themselves in pre-Hispanic Philippine society, the situation of the Filipino today is markedly different. Born into one language, she is called to learn Filpino or Tagalog at a young age. By the time she is done \yid’ elementary schooling, our young Filipino speaks two or three languages at the very least: Her mother tongue, Tagalog, and English, in various degrees of skill and proficiency. If, at some point in her young life she finds herself working abroad in a non-English speaking country, a fourth language very often now forms part of her linguistic repertoire. I spent eight years of studies in Rome. There, some of our Filipino migrant workers have come to speak fluent Italian. It is easy enough to imagine many of our fellow Filipinos working in other countries speaking Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, French, among others.

Who then is the Filipino today? Perhaps it might be helpful to pore that Filipino identity is implicated in three worlds. First, there is the world of her birth and childhood, the world of family and relatives, the world of her local community. Second, there is the world of %viral Benedict Anderson (1991) calls her imagined national community, she is heir to a common history that tells her she is Filipino. Third, there is the international community; it could be that, at some point in her life, she finds herself working in some country having to speak a foreign language. The fact that she speaks English is very often touted to be a plus, and therefore an advantage for her. If it happens that she gets employed in a call center in Eastwood in Quezon City or some such place, she will most probably be speaking in English.

At least three worlds therefore: The local, the national, and the international. In every world, she speaks a language. The three worlds are not of course clearly demarcated among themselves. It could be that the sense of belonging to a national community remains the least developed in her. The Filipino does not seem to possess the same attachment to the Filipino language as the Japanese is to hers, or the Korean, or the Vietnamese.

What implications are there therefore for Filipino national identity when she has to live in three worlds and express herself in, through, and across three different languages? Could it be that social injustice in our time must also mean being reduced to speaking one and only one language? Could it be that poverty in our time means the absence of any opportunity to speak one or two other languages than one’s own mother tongue?