THOUGHT LEADERS

Filipino, the language that is not one

Filipino is the national language that seeks to become more than a native tongue and aspires to
become the nation’s official speech. It is contaminated and compromised from the start by the
very languages it seeks to exclude or subordinate.

Vicente L. Rafael The ghost month of August is also

Published 3:30 PM, August 21, celebrated as “Buwan ng Wika.” It is
2015 dedicated to propagating the national
Updated 6:56 AM, August 24,
language, Filipino, at a time when there
2015
has been on-going debate as to its
future in the curriculum of higher
education, thanks to the reforms being
contemplated by the Commission on
Higher Education (CHED).

Those who teach and advocate the wider use of Filipino see CHED
as threatening its place with the current proposals to abolish its
teaching as a language at the university level in the coming years.
Instead, universities would be left to decide which courses would
be in Filipino and which in English.

Claiming that without proper protections, Filipino will not be able

to match the sway of English among students and fearing the loss
of their jobs, teachers of Filipino have been fierce in their
opposition to such proposals.

To clarify the stakes in this current debate, we might begin by

inquiring about the nature of Filipino itself.

What kind of a language is it? What is the ideology and politics of

its development? And how is its emergence linked to European
colonial and romantic ideas about the power of the nation-state to
order, in all sense of that word, linguistic and cultural differences?
To answer these questions, we can turn to the highly instructive
document, “Frequently Asked Questions on Filipino,” issued by the
Komisyon sa Wikang Pambansa (Commission on National
Language).
Filipino, according to the Komisyon, is not one language but two. It
is both a national and – because based on Tagalog—a native
language.

However, Filipino also seeks to differentiate itself from its origins

in Tagalog. It begins by substituting “Filipino” for “Pilipino,” using
the letter “f” found in other vernaculars in order to distance itself
from Tagalog that has only the letter “p.”

Furthermore, by contrast to the plurality of Tagalog “dialects,” the

Komisyon insists that there ought to be only one Filipino: that
which has been standardized by the Surian’s offices and
prescribed in schools. It’s as if Filipino can become truly national
only when it has definitively subordinated the many Tagalogs to
the one Filipino. Becoming national thus entails that Filipino
establish itself on top of Tagalog, translating the latter into an
instrument with which to achieve a trans-local reach as the
language not of one group but of everyone in the archipelago.

Preservation of vernaculars

And what of the many other vernaculars throughout the

archipelago?

As with Tagalog, so too with other native tongues. The Komisyon

calls for their preservation and use as “auxiliary languages” in the
learning of Filipino and in the enhancement of its national reach.
Such a call implies two things. First, that native languages are in
danger of disappearing or, at the very least, falling into obscurity.
For this reason, they are in need of protection. Second, that as the
language learned from birth, they should be pressed into serving
as assistants in the apprehension of Filipino. The mother tongues
are meant to nurture the growth of the national language itself.

Vernaculars, from the perspective of the Komisyon, take on a dual

and somewhat contradictory aspect. They are both essential and
supplementary – indeed, as endangered as they are robust. Like
mothers, they are expected to take care of the speech of the
young—students from K-3rd grades, for example, who, since 2012,
have been taught first in their mother tongues before being taught
Filipino and English.

But just as one grows up to leave one’s mother, students are

supposed to mature to the point of being able to leave behind
those very mother tongues. At once indispensible and disposable,
native tongues exist once again in the service of the national,
supporting it to the extent that they are subordinate to it.

As one of the mother tongues, Tagalog is meant to share the

same fate as the other vernaculars. Insofar as Filipino grows out
of Tagalog, the Komisyon claims that Tagalog is naturally superior
to other vernaculars. It cites the authority of various American
authors, who, harking back to early Spanish missionaries, point to
Tagalog as the most “refined” and “intellectually developed” of the
vernaculars.

Hence, while the Komisyon claims that there exists a natural

kinship among all Philippine languages, thereby making each
readily familiar and easy to learn, this family relationship is also an
unequal one. Just as the national language rules over its native
origin, so is Tagalog situated as first among its linguistic siblings.
And it does so based on what non-Tagalogs and non-Filipinos
have said about it.

Hierarchy of languages

This hierarchy of languages that privileges Tagalog over other

vernaculars is further buttressed by another key distinction that
the Komisyon makes: that between native and foreign languages.
Native languages are those that are natural to their speakers: they
grow up speaking it as a first language, learned presumably from
their mothers or someone who assumes that role.

Foreign languages are those that come from the outside, spoken
by non-natives. English and the varieties of Chinese languages fall
into this latter category. According to the Komisyon, foreign
languages will always remain foreign. They cannot and do not
grow naturally on Philippine soil. They thus exist as unassimilable
languages, beyond naturalization and localization. Wholly distinct
from all the mother tongues, they can, at best, be step-mother
tongues. They can never aspire to become a national language.

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By essentializing the place of English and Chinese languages as

irreducibly alien and outside the nation, the Komisyon thus
disavows the plain fact that both languages are spoken by
sizeable numbers of people as either their first language at home,
or as a lingua franca across ethno-linguistic divides. Just as
vernacular languages are mother tongues that naturally belong to
the national language as their essential supplements, so foreign
languages can only be alien impositions that intrude and disrupt
the family romance among languages.

Harking back to German idealist notions that conceive of the

national language as the very spirit that animates national culture,
the Komisyon holds that Filipino leading the mother tongues will
ensure the life of the nation. Such a task becomes all the more
imperative in the face of the threat posed by foreign languages –
French in the case of a Germany under Napoleonic occupation,
English in the case of the Philippines still under the American
colonial shadow.

External to the nation, foreign languages from the perspective of

romantic nationalism, can only spell the death of national culture.
Such views have been espoused by writers as diverse as Fichte
and Cabral, Jose Rizal and Renato Constantino. Subordinating the
mother tongues while overcoming foreign languages is the
manner by which Filipino underwrites what the Komisyon regards
to be the cultural vitality of the nation-state.

It’s not too hard to see how this linguistic nationalism continues
the legacy of colonial ideology, which tends to map linguistic
hierarchy onto social hierarchy.

We can further see this continuity in the role of the State,

especially in the area of education. While Filipino has long
assumed the status of a national language, it has also long
aspired to become the sole official language. Such aspirations
have been constrained by English, which continues to be the
dominant language of the State, as sanctioned by the
Constitution. The English-using State thus comes across as an
alien presence when addressing the nation conceived in Filipino-
Tagalog terms. This linguistic divide echoes a long history of
conflict between the State – a colonial innovation introduced by
the Spaniards--and the nation--a belated development that
emerged in and through the contradictions of colonial governance
by the late nineteenth century.

Filipino as the putatively authentic language of the nation seeks to

defend the latter from the abuses, imagined or real, of the English-
speaking State deeded directly by the American colonial regime.

However, the Filipino-speaking nation also needs the English-

speaking State to fund its programs and schools, provide
teachers’ salaries and pensions, set rules and curricula for its
students. Without the State, the nation would be without the
institutional resources it needs to survive amid a welter of social
pressures and ethnic differences. Just as English during the
American period excluded Spanish to become hegemonic over
other languages in the Philippines, so, too, does Filipino in the
post-war Republic now seek to displace English.

Gradualist approach

This change, however, is seen to happen gradually, sometime in

the future, once Filipino is deemed ready to take over English.
Such a gradualist approach echoes the politics of independence
under US rule when Filipinos were promised eventual sovereignty
once the US judged them capable of governing themselves.

Filipino’s ability to replace English as the official language is hence

subject to constant delay and deferral. A staple contention of the
Komisyon is that Filipino is still a language in development. It is
yet to be fully “intellectualized” and is still not quite capable of
serving as an adequate language for conveying knowledge
derived from the West. Where Filipino is concerned, the task of
translation is forever beginning. As such, advocates of Filipino are
acutely conscious of its position as not being quite equal to, and
not being as modern as, English.

Structurally subordinate to English, Filipino is seen by its

proponents to be always already vulnerable to attack and
diminution. It requires protection and nourishment both from the
nation’s mother tongues and from the State. At the same time, it is
always on the verge of being betrayed by both. The mother
tongues grumble and threaten to rebel against the so-called
impositions of imperial Filipino. The State, for its part, continues
to insist on the use of English for addressing the world and its
own population. Despite the President’s use of the national
language in his addresses, Ingleseros in the State and among
elites, along with a growing horde of Fil-Am and Fil-foreign
scholars and returnees, are seen to threaten the place of Filipino
in schools and society.

Filipino thus occupies an ambiguous position, perhaps analogous

to many other vernacularly-based national languages around the
world.

It is the first among vernaculars even as it is rendered subordinate

and intellectually beneath the other official language, English. It is
the language of the nation that remains dependent upon, yet
resistant to, the State. It seeks to protect the imagined integrity of
a national culture that is at the same time infiltrated by, and
infused with, a dizzying array of foreign borrowings, traversed by a
history of colonial occupations and, more recently, the forces of
globalization.

Filipino is the national language that seeks to become more than

a native tongue and aspires to become – even as it chronically
fails – the nation’s official speech. It is thus itself only by
becoming other, asserting (even as it seeks to transcend) its given
condition. It is contaminated and compromised from the start by
the very languages it seeks to exclude or subordinate: the foreign
and the vernacular.

Filipino bases its authority on its claim to serve as the authentic

and democratic medium for conveying the sentiments of the
nation and unifying its disparate parts. The strength of this claim,
however, is also its weakness. Its authority, based on the claim of
authenticity, also means that it thrives on the pathos of colonial
victimization and nationalist injury characteristic of romantic
ideology.

Contradictions of Filipino

Like the nation, Filipino is often regarded as oppressed and

vulnerable to attack by foreign interests and languages. Its self-
confessed intellectual unpreparedness requires constant support,
while its institutional marginalization triggers dissent.
Holding out the promise of bringing about a more just and unified
nation, proponents of Filipino decry the betrayals of elites and
unjust treatment in the hands of the English-using State and its
universities. At the same time, it seeks to consolidate, in the face
of linguistic pluralism, a linguistic hierarchy and, in the midst of
cosmopolitan globalization, a nativist exceptionalism.

As I pointed out earlier, the pattern of enforcing a hierarchy of

languages in order to manage the insistence of heterogeneous,
populist, and often insurgent expressiveness are the historical
legacies of Spanish and American rule. The debates about the
national language, such as they are, are thus borne by what we
might think of as the linguistic colonial unconscious deposited
into the foundations of a national culture constantly under
pressure from regional and global changes.

Such are the irresolvable contradictions of Filipino – the language

that is not one. Its condition, if the Komisyon is to be believed,
mirrors that of the nation conceived as distinct from, yet
dependent upon, the State itself. The vicissitudes of Filipino thus
encapsulates the conundrum of the country’s national culture
today and no doubt for some time to come.

Filipino is the national language that seeks to become more than

a native tongue and aspires to become – even as it chronically
fails – to be the nation’s official speech. It is contaminated and
compromised from the start by the very languages it seeks to
exclude or subordinate. – Rappler.com

Vicente L. Rafael teaches history at the Univ. of Washington in

Seattle.

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