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Tongue-tied:
Centers, Margins, and Their Filipino Tongues
By Dennis Aguinaldo
IN US of A,
the formula for the societal power-wielders is WASP. The acronym
stands for "White," "Anglo-Saxon," and "Protestant."
Skin-color,
Race, Religion. These people basically get less harassment, better
job openings, benefits, etc. And definitely more political clout.
Everybody else is a minority, an unknown quantity, a supporting
actress, a staff-member, exotica.
With notable
exceptions, of course (I don't subscribe to the idea that globalization
necessarily entails homogenization), but undeniably, this is the
general case there.
I've been trying
to find out if we have a Filipino equivalent of the acronym. I'm
trying to soup one out too, in case there isn't. It may be very
un-pantayong pananaw to do so, but small and snappy formulations
gets attention and, if properly executed and contextualized, achieves
staying power. Ask those advertisers and PR people!
Here in the
Philippines, the favored people are "Tagalog" and "Catholic."
I should add maleness too. I admit that I am all of the above. "Tagalog"
denotes both language and ethnicity. It also says that you are much
closer to the Greater Manila Area, both in terms of physical distance
and access to key institutions.
As a language,
the message is loud and clear. Some Cebuanos refer to Tagalogs as
"mga anak ng Diyos". With something much, much less than
a worshipful tone. They are right though. Tagalog claims to be "language"
and all the other languages are subjected to being called "dialects."
I heard somewhere that a language is just a dialect with an army.
That is correct in our case too.
They are right
when they say that more Filipinos are born with Cebuano as a mother
tongue. The Tagalog retort is that more Filipinos know Tagalog either
as a mother tongue or as a second (sibling?) tongue. Of course,
the brawl doesn't end there. Cebuano representatives say that it's
that way because of the educational system which of course points
back to the fact that Filipino, the constitutional language, was
based on Tagalog.
That's just
one of the debated points in the Cebuano-Tagalog discourse. And
we haven't gone up to the Northlanders' Ilocano and English yet.
I tried learning
Cebuano. I had this petty crush on a Cebuana. I took Filipino 10.1
and I went on to 10.2 even when my affections for the girl faded.
The affection now, belonged to language. It's still there. Although,
I fear I'll just hear another Cebuana tell me "pakiramdam mo
anak ka ng Diyos" in her mother tongue.
They say you
only need three languages to get around the archipelago (besides
our heritage of English). Ilocano for the North, Tagalog down here,
and Cebuano everywhere else. Down South, our state's bias toward
Catholicism is being constantly challenged.
President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo just declared December 17 as a national holiday
because it marked the end of Ramadan. That was certainly long overdue.
Now, it just looks like a tactic. Funny that there was a call to
a ceasefire when the whole December 17 concept showed that war will
now also be waged on the cultural front.
We can just
wait and see, and just hope that when the smoke clears, we will
have a better understanding of our political composition and much,
much better treatment of those people we call "minority"
and their speech which we call "dialect." They are, in
truth, better known as "marginalized" brothers and sisters
with their own rich language and heritage.
But when the
smoke clears, if it ever does during our lifetimes, we will only
see the product of our neglect. Of our "waiting" and "seeing."
And the true Filipinos are called, in our own fields, in our own
ways, to do something else. Something better. Something.
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Dennis Aguinaldo is 23, Katoliko, Lalake, and Tagalog (KaLaT?).
He works for an NGO involved in Blindness Prevention. He had too
few units on Philippine Studies. For those readers profoundly interested
in language and culture, he advises them NOT to make that mistake.
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