McEachern: Native languages, natural stewardship
THE role of language in local knowledge systems, in particular environmental and ecological knowledge, is rarely recognized by non-natives, urbanites, and those who have gone through a conventionally rigid classroom/textbook education. As McConvell and Thieberger (2001) write in a report on...
McEachern: Language loss and the environment
I’VE OFTEN discussed the benefits of language preservation, but one topic I hadn’t explored was environmental stewardship. Once I read about the connections between language and environment, my skeptical curiosity turned to, “Yeah, that makes perfect sense, why didn’t I think of that before?”
McEachern: Language spinning wheels
I LIKE riding public transport. For one, it is more environmentally-friendly than private transport (if the transportation system meets certain standards and is properly maintained), and is often cheaper than owning your own car.
McEachern: Defeating a people
THE denigration of native languages and peoples is common practice in the Philippines.
When groups outside the NCR are represented on Philippine TV shows, it is stereotypically negative: "extremists" and "terrorists" in Mindanao, uneducated yayas from Visayas, head hunters and rebels in...
McEachern: When minorities turn against themselves
WHILE there can be benefits of having a national language, such as ease of communication between disparate groups, there can also be some unpleasant social side effects.
McEachern: In sociolinguistics, no man is an island
OUTSIDE native Tagalog areas of Luzon, Tagalog is associated with the upwardly mobile. The local languages, meanwhile, are most often the domain of the underprivileged, and increasingly so.
McEachern: Language loss and social stratification
TARIQ Rahman is a professor at Quaid-i-Azam University and has written about the damage inflexible linguistic policies have had on Pakistani society. Like the Philippines, Pakistan reacted to colonialism in a very nationalistic way, defining only one native national language (Urdu) and elevating...
McEachern: Biting the hand that feeds you
LAST year, I saw an independent film called ASTRO MAYABANG in the EDSA Shangri-la Mall in Ortigas Center. It was entirely in the Kapampangan language, with English subtitles. Set in Angeles City, it featured a boy who falls head over heels for a Pam-Am (Pampango-American) girl, and runs into all...
McEachern: Information gap
THE term Filipino as referred to the National Language leads many to believe there is only one language in the Philippines. Tourists who don’t know anything about the country, for example, often wonder what language they speak here. Following the English pattern of people-language associations (...
McEachern: Mixing myth
IN THE last article, we studied the reason why local dialects/languages are unable to impact the speech patterns of Manileños very much, and in turn, why the national language -- at least in the context of the National Capital Region -- has not been able to incorporate many Philippine languages...
McEachern: The core of a language?
IN THE Plenary Session of the Constitutional Commission on September 1, 1986, Commissioner Blas Ople justified the change of the spelling of the national language from Pilipino to Filipino: "[Filipino with an F] is a code word for a highly liberalized Filipino, open-ended, not only ready but...
McEachern: Language debates
MANY of the ideas surrounding the national language debate of the Constitutional Commission of 1986 stemmed from the opinions of a few intellectuals like Dr. Ernesto Constantino, Dr. Consuelo J. Paz, Prof. Jesus Fer. Ramos, Dr. Bonifacio Sibayan, Dr. Andrew Gonzalez, and Ponciano Pineda, to name...
McEachern: Unfulfilled vision
HERE are three sentences, which you probably understand:
Saan kayo magtutungo pagkatapos dito?
Naku! Magnanakaw pala yung binata.
Huwag ka man magtakbo.
And here are the same 3 sentences in another language, which is probably not as familiar:
Sain kayo...
McEachern: Scientifically, Filipino is still Tagalog
IN LINGUISTICS terms, a language is defined as being mutually unintelligible with another language. That is, speakers of two different languages will not be able to understand each other if they talk in their respective tongues. If they mostly understand each other, they share -- by definition...
McEachern: Confusion over Filipino
ON PAPER (i.e. the Constitution), Filipino is the national language. But what is Filipino? Is it the same as Pilipino or Tagalog? Does it even exist? If so, when did it form? What was its status in 1987, when the Philippines’ most recent Constitution came out declaring it as the national...
McEachern: The Constitution and the national language
IN THE past few weeks we’ve taken a look at the history of the national language up until 1950, and how by then it was still essentially synonymous with Tagalog. Today, some people will tell you that the national language, Filipino, is now different from Tagalog.
McEachern: Tagalog is not the national language
IN DECEMBER 1937 President Quezon issued Executive Order 134, stating, among other things:
McEachern: Language planning
THE Philippines has a long history of less-than-stellar public participation in language planning.
McEachern: Linguistic minority
ARIEL Dorfman is a novelist, poet, human rights activist and distinguished professor at Duke University in the United States. He was once the cultural advisor to the President of Chile, and wrote a book about US cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck. In his book 'The Wandering Bigamists...
McEachern: A battle of stubbornness
THE other day I had the following conversation. It is a remake of a conversation I've had at least 100 times in my eight months here. The man, about thirty, was wearing a nice pair of jeans, a clean white collared shirt, new looking sneakers, and sunglasses around his neck. His clothes, along...
Mceachern: The gatekeeper of culture
LANGUAGE is sort of a gatekeeper of culture. It can keep the complex threads of a culture intact, and it can also act as a buffer against the less appealing aspects of more dominant, invasive cultures. If you lose your mother tongue, your culture may lose its main glue and defense. You and your...
McEachern: Preserving language diversity
WOULD you be surprised if preserving and strengthening language diversity had economic advantages too? It’s quite a reasonable proposition actually. Regional languages prompt the need for customized regional services. If the 10 major languages of the Philippines, for example, were given official...
McEachern: Destroying languages
A SOCIETY with lots of languages is, I believe, a healthier society. To be more precise, a society that allows for the preservation and development of many languages is healthier than one that passively or actively destroys them. Right now the Philippines is in the latter camp, with probably 90...
McEachern: Being multilingual is good
IF YOU have many language groups in a small country like the Philippines, then people are compelled to learn more languages. Most Filipinos (except those in Tagalog areas) are trilingual in their native language, Tagalog, and English. In the Cordilleras, many people are even more multilingual,...
McEachern: The advantages of many languages
AS WE'VE discussed, linguistic homogeneity is not a prerequisite for harmony. But is the opposite -- linguistic diversity -- outrightly good? In a previous article, I explored this question from an academic perspective. Languages contain a wealth of information that anthropologists use to study...
