IF there is one certain indicator of the bias of a person in relation to the issue of our national language, it is to argue that it is Tagalog. When one fails to appreciate the difference between Filipino and Tagalog, then that person would be handicapped by an incapacity to understand the symbolic power of differentiating the two.
It is easy to fall into the trap of saying that Filipino is just Tagalog with a different name. But one has to distinguish the two to understand the need to continually nurture the teaching of Filipino and Panitikan even at the tertiary level. After all, many of those who argue against the teaching of these courses to college students are also the same people who believe that Filipino is simply Tagalog.
We are a country with a sense of nationhood that is still in the process of becoming. Whereas the template for a nation has already been firmly established in many other countries, including our Southeast Asian neighbors, we remain as a people that continue to negotiate for the legitimacy of our soul as a nation. Centuries of colonial rule have left us with the reality that what binds us together are borrowed templates, from our religion to our system of education and even the way we govern ourselves.
We see this in the manner we have made our presence felt vis-à-vis our others, those who are different from us. Any visit to any foreign country, especially in their main tourist destinations, would be a rich encounter with local narratives. Jakarta and Bangkok offer a rich array of representations that can easily depict their countries having a well-defined and well-articulated cultural heritage. A visit to Phuket and Bali will give you a gustatory delight of tasting Thai or Balinese food, while you are being entertained by Muay Thai, Thai dancing, or be awed by the daily processions that wind through the streets of Ubud in Bali.
Yet, in response, what we offer to the tourists that visit Boracay or El Nido are foreign food from American, to Italian, German and Korean, to even Thai and Vietnamese. We entertain them with Polynesian fire-dancing, or by simply opening beach front disco pubs. When we go to other countries, they offer us their culture and heritage. And when they come to the Philippines, we are so hospitable and we don’t want them to miss home that we still offer them their own culture and heritage.
The cultures of other countries are so well-defined and robust that they end up opening restaurants in major capitals in the world offering their own cuisine. And what we end up exporting is our own brand of chicken, burger and spaghetti of Jollibee, as if this is the best Filipino food we can offer.
In the end, we keep on serving the interests, pleasures and conveniences of the other, whether in tourism or in exporting our labor force. When foreign students come to the Philippines, we do not require them to first learn our language and take a proficiency exam. Instead, we entice them by boasting that English is our medium of instruction. This, even as we spend time learning Japanese, German, French and other languages whenever we want to enroll in Japan, Germany, France and other countries where English is not a medium of instruction.
People argue that the move to strengthen our national language proficiency, by insisting that we retain the teaching of Filipino even at the tertiary level, will compromise our comparative advantage in English. They also point out that doing so would be foolish considering that even our Asian neighbors are now giving a lot of premium on English proficiency among their citizens.
What these people conveniently ignore is that our Asian neighbors are learning to use English to penetrate the world market from a position of economic strength and cultural confidence. They engage the global economy knowing that they have firmly established their own national identities. Their educational systems are still using their own languages as the medium of instruction until the tertiary level.
In contrast, we use our comparative advantage in English to serve the global economy. We export an English-speaking, though not all fluent, labor force to do blue-collar jobs abroad. We train Filipinos to speak English like a natural to become workers in the BPO industry that serves the needs of people from other countries with broken phones or who want to book hotels and airline tickets.
The need to build a nation rests on a robust collective soul, and having a national language, which in our case, is a continuing project that has to be nurtured, is an indispensable ingredient. Our geography is so fractured that we need to have a sense of a nation that is not built on the shadows of our colonizers. We face a pluralism of regional languages and dialects, and the Constitution has mandated us to evolve a national language, which we now call Filipino.
There is no debate that evolving a national language is a contentious process, but one has to start with something that already functions to enable us to communicate and understand each other amidst our national diversity. This is precisely why it appears that Tagalog has become the de facto template, because it is undeniably the lingua franca. No one can deny that people from different regions communicate in Tagalog. Our national popular culture, from films to TV soap operas, are delivered in Tagalog.
But this does not mean that we have to stop there. Tagalog is not Filipino. The challenge is to enrich Filipino to enable it to acquire a new lexicon, and make it truly reflect our diversity. This would require the continuous teaching of Filipino not as a static language, but as an evolving one.
And the Supreme Court allowing the Commission on Higher Education to delist Filipino from the core courses at the tertiary level amounts to a fundamental slap on the face of this process.
It is here that the Supreme Court erred, perhaps weighed down by the fact that the justices were forced to rule on an issue that is not legally justiciable, but is an academic one. We could not reason out that just because Filipino is already taught at the basic level, that it is enough to provide the venue for it to evolve. For Filipino to evolve, it has to have an academic space at the tertiary level where it will have the opportunity to engage the higher-order skills required for its development as a national language. And this should not just be an option, but should be required. After all, nation building should never be just an option.
Those who oppose Filipino take pleasure in further shaming the language by saying that it is a fair decision simply because it is a useless language anyway. They say we should just keep our advantage in English over our Asian neighbors. These people must be told that our Asian neighbors may be struggling to learn English. We may take pride in boasting that we are in fact better than them. But we have to realize that they are the ones laughing their way to the bank, in their own languages, while we are busy just serving them, or teaching them English.
https://www.manilatimes.net/the-shaming-of-the-national-language/468961/
https://www.manilatimes.net/the-shaming-of-the-national-language/468961/
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