Americanization of the Philippine Languages

I don’t know how many times this topic has been discussed but I say that indeed the contemporary culture of the Philippines is very much affected with the American colonization more than the Spanish. Americans were here only since 1898 whereas the Spaniards were here since 1521. With that, Filipinos came to be called “little brown Americans”.

We all know how English (or precisely, how American) we are. Look at our street signs: 99% are in English. Everywhere we go, English is in the air. From the songs we fondly sing in our videokes to the text message we send. English is of course taught in schools at all levels. Since there are lots of situations where English rules, I’ll point next where in the Philippines English is not used. Note though that the spoken vernacular is peppered liberally with English words making them Taglish, Bislish, etc:

• Speaking/socializing. We use the regional languages (Tagalog, Bisaya, Ilocano, etc). This situation now creates a broken language e.g. Taglish and Bislish among the Pinoy educated elite. Examples: Tagalog: Fluent me mag-English. (I’m fluent in English);  Bisaya: Gi-cramps akong feet. (I have cramps in my feet). This phenomenon happens also with other regional languages. I just don’t know what will happen to the spoken languages in the country, 50 to 100 years from now. But I pray that the regional languages will still be spoken. As what happens to Spanish in Zamboanga or the French in Haiti, I suspect that a creole language will ultimately rise. So we will have lots of varieties of it in the country since we have seven major languages. Imagine these seven giving up to an English creole.

• Mass media (>50% Tagalog). Yes it’s around that because broadcast media is 70% Tagalog (broken down into TV broadcast (90% Tag.), AM broadcast (100% Tagalog), FM broadcast (100% English). Local cinema is also in Tagalog. However, the print media (newspapers, magazines) is by far around 90% circulation in English.

• Schools, churches, the government and commerce. This is quite tricky since it’s given that printed/written texts are exclusively in English in these institutions, but the vernacular prevails in the speaking arena. In schools for example, even for English classes, the teachers switch to the vernacular when teaching i.e. in explaining the concepts. The churches (Roman Catholic for example) have their service in English or the vernacular. The government speaks primarily in English, but in the vernacular most often in one-on-one conversations. The situation in the government is more or less the same with commerce and business. Almost all firms in the country speak the vernacular in their day-to-day activities.

That’s all there is to the local languages. It seems that English is so intertwined with our daily lives that it seems so hard to live without using it. I can say that this has effects on the Filipino psyche. Even my dreams are trilingual: Bisaya, Tagalog and English.