In the month of celebrating
the Pambansang Wika last year,an essay by Ateneo
senior James Soriano was published in The Manila Bulletin (MB) trumpeting the privileged
status of English over the Filipino language in the
Philippines from his point of view, a rich English-speaking Filipino student. It
got mixed reactions from Filipino netizens which led to MB’s withdrawal of it
and to other Filipino writers’ responding to it. One of the responses is the
essay by former U.P. professor Mila D. Aguilar in defense of multilingualism
and against superiority of English language. The two essays are chosen for analysis based on the
importance of the issues presented and the enormous public interest they
attracted.
This post is an analysis of the assumptions about language
that are embedded in the two essays. The analysis is guided by Martin’s (2010)
book chapter on the myths about English in the Philippines. Overall, she
suggests that the combined power of curriculum, western literary canon, and
pedagogy during the American colonial period propagated present-day myths about
English language. These myths are originally conceptualized by Kachru (cited in
Martin, 2010).
Myth
1: English and Filipino are languages in opposition.
Martin (2010) summarizes this myth as “the
[English] language. . . in direct opposition with other Philippine languages,
especially the national language” (p. 257). In his article, Soriano highlighted
the privileged status of English in the Philippines and took it against the
Filipino language, positing that the two operate in mutually exclusive domains.
He said that English is the language of learning while Filipino is the language
of the streets. The Filipino is language portrayed as ‘the other’ subject which
is to be learned for his survival in the outside world.
In
response, Aguilar said that the Filipinos are multilingual and the Filipino
language is equally intellectual as it can be used to translate Bible verses
and to teach sciences at U.P. Personally, I also think that this dichotomy is
false considering that the Filipino was used by Pres. Benigno Aquino III himself
in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) last July 25, 2011 and has been used in
our literature. Conversely, English is also used in rap songs and pop songs
which belong to the streets and are not of formal register.
Myth 2: English is the
only language of learning.
This myth is the assumption that the English language is the
only language which provides access to knowledge, especially in Mathematics and
science (Martin, 2010). The first sentence of Soriano’s article clearly reflects
this myth: “English is the language of learning”. He recalls his childhood experiences
in learning his Math, Science, and Religion lessons in English. He went on to say
that Filipino is not the language of the learned in the classroom, the
boardroom, the courtroom or the operating room.
Aguilar
responded in two planks in defense of the Filipino and the mother tongue.
First, she said that U.P. professors are actually using Filipino in teaching
biology, physics, and chemistry. Second, she implied that the mother tongue is a
better medium of instruction by mentioning her father’s Sta. Barbara Experiment
proving that the mother tongue results to more efficient learning in Grades 1
and 2.
At
present, the view that English is the only language of learning has been put to
question by research and policies. The Department of Education (Dep. Ed.)
already issued Dep. Ed. Order No. 74 S. 2009 “Institutionalizing Mother
Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MLE)” which mandates the use of the mother
tongue as medium of instruction (MOI) in the early years of schooling. Even in
the higher education, research has been done in proving that 1) using English
as MOI does not make mathematics concepts easier to understand (Bernardo as
cited in Martin, 2010); 2) code switching has been done by Filipino Science
teachers to aid instruction (Martin as cited in Martin, 2010).
Myth 3: English is not
a Philippine language.
Though not one of the myths suggested by Kachru (cited in
Martin, 2010), this assumption is evident. This is the view that English is
still a possession of the Filipinos’ colonizers and therefore, does not
represent the nation's identity. By implication, the mastery of English is a betrayal
to the Filipino identity.
Soriano calls himself “a split-level
Filipino” for having English as his mother tongue. He realizes that he “smell[s]
than a malansang isda” and “may be
disconnected from my [his] being a Filipino” because he chooses English over
Filipino. This reveals the mentality that 1) only the Filipino language and
other Philippine local languages give identity to Filipinos; and 2) one’s
mastery and preference of English is necessarily a detachment from the Filipino
identity.
Aguilar also fell victim to this. She maintains that she
embraces English as a multilingual Filipino and what she is complaining about
is the insistence of its superiority in the Philippine scene. However, this is
rather contradictory as she still refers to English as “the language of the
conquistador” (as her parallel to Spanish in the past). Further, she ended her
piece with “Meanwhile, I will use the language of the reconquistador to shout
down its proponents.” This suggests that she views English as a tool of the (neo)colonizers
and feels that she just have to use English for the sake of pinning down the agenda of its masters and not to use it out of genuine embracing of English as Philippines’ own.
This mentality is blind to the reality that English is
not anymore owned by its native speakers but appropriated by different
communities that use it (Widdowson, 1994). In particular, Philippine English is "a ‘variety of English in its own right, associated with a distinct
accent, a localized vocabulary, and even a body of creative writing by
Philippine writers in English” (Bolton and Bautista, 2009: 9) and is recognized
as a distinct variety of Asian English (Bolton, 2011). It is only when we accept
English as our own that any “justified” promotion of English in policy-making
is not taken against any other Philippine languages.
References
Aguilar, Mila (2011). The Filipino is
Multilingual. Retrieved from http://philippinehistory.ph/the -filipino-is-
Bolton, Kingsley. (2011). Introduction:
The study of Philippine English: The contribution of corpus linguistics.
In Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista
(Ed.), Studies of Philippine English: Exploring the Philippine
Component of the
International Corpus of English (pp. xi-xiv). Mandaluyong City: Anvil.
Bolton, Kingsley and Ma. Lourdes S.
Bautista. (2009). Philippine English: Linguistic and literary
perspectives. In Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista and
Kingsley Bolton (Eds.), Philippine English:
Linguistic and Literary Perspectives (pp. 1-9). Pasig
City: Anvil.
Martin, Isabel. (2010). Periphery ELT:
The politics and practice of teaching English in the Philippines. In
Andy Kirkpatrick
(Ed.), The Routledge handbook of world
Englishes (pp. 247-264). New York:
Routledge.
Soriano,
James (2011). Language, learning, identity, privilege. Retrieved from
Widdowson,
H. G. 1994. ‘The ownership of English’. TESOL Quarterly 28: 377–88.
