16

The Philippines

Andrew Gonzalez, FSC

16.1 Introduction: a National Language in Search of a Nation

The Director of the Philippines Institute of National Language from 1955 to 1969,
Jose Villa Panganiban, a person who had dedicated his entire life to the development
of the national language of his country, is recorded to have lamented, as he lay dying,
that Pilipino (the name of the national language at the time) was ‘a language in
search of a people (or a nation)’.

1

In more prosaic language, what the late director

was lamenting was the fact that it seemed that in spite of decades of work by the
Institute of National Language (the oYcial development agency for the selection,
standardization, propagation, and cultivation of the national language), the national
language had not yet been accepted by the people of the Philippines at large
(Gonzalez 1980).

As a more general observation on societal patterns in the Philippines the journalist

James Fallows (1987: 49–52) has described the Philippines as suVering from ‘a dam-
aged culture’, a collocation not much appreciated by educated Filipinos who read the
account, but expressing a view which has been echoed elsewhere, in much of its
basics, in other broad characterizations of life in the Philippines, as, for example, the
Japanese anthropologist Yasushi Kikuchi’s less direct and more diplomatic (1991)
description of the Philippines as a country not having attained ‘a crystallized culture’.
It seems that in trying to understand the Philippines and the slow rate of develop-
ment it has achieved in spite of its natural resources and the educational level and
personalism of its people, one route of explanation is to try to relate this to a lack of
cohesion in the country as a political body, and to call attention to internal divisions
and the absence of a strong sense of communal unity and nationhood. This lack of
cohesion manifests itself in various ways in everyday life and surfaces widely in the
general occurrence of individualism, a lack of trust in the government, graft and tax
evasion, corruption within the government, a common ambivalence towards the

1

This recollection comes from former Institute of National Language Assistant Director Fe Aldave

Yap.

national language, and a lack of pride in forming a nation, resulting in attention being
more frequently called to negative attributes of the country than to its accomplish-
ments. Hence, since we have won precious few battles in our history, we tend
to commemorate our defeats rather than our victories: the Fall of Bataan, the Fall
of Corregidor, and the Cry of Balintawak (ending in an aborted revolution). The
people’s clear ambivalence towards their national language is manifest in the con-
tinuation of the dominant use of English in their educational system, the low
readership of the print medium in Filipino, the emphasis on English in the public
domain, and the slow, unenthusiastic spread and adoption of the national language.
Quite broadly, then, the Philippines is a country where the promotion of a common,
‘national’ language has (thus far) not been particularly successful as a means to mould
and strengthen a national identity linking up the population in a clearly positive way,
and in this contrasts with the stronger unifying force of national language in other
Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Thailand. How this situation has
developed in the Philippines, and how the very mixed population of the country
presently relates to diVerent forms of language will now be examined in more detail,
beginning with a consideration of historical factors underlying the present sociolin-
guistic situation.

The Philippines

The Philippines

361

16.2 History as a Means of Understanding the Philippine
Sociolinguistic Situation

Prior to the Spanish colonization of the Philippines in 1565 there are no written
records of the islands that make up the modern-day Philippines. Though the ancient
inhabitants of the islands had a syllabic form of writing derived from South India
(Francisco 1973), no written records of chronological events recorded in the script are
still extant, and knowledge of the prehistory of the Philippines therefore depends on
realia

(jars, bone, stone and metal instruments) and on the comparison of languages

currently present in the archipelago. Using such resources, various careful attempts
have been made to reconstruct the prehistory of the islands (Beyer 1935: 476–7, 483,
515–17; Jocano 1975; Solheim 1981: 17–83; Concepcion and Fox 1967), suggesting the
following pattern of development. As far as can be established, the earliest inhabitants
of the islands, commonly referred to as the ‘Negritos’, came to the Philippines many
thousands of years ago via land bridges that connected the Philippines with mainland
Asia. Such land bridges later disappeared due to the melting of the ice at the end of the
last Glacial Period, and subsequent waves of settlers all arrived by boat, from various
parts of east and southeast Asia. One group coming from southern China by-passed
Taiwan and settled in northern Luzon (the main island of the Philippines, in the
north). Another group is assumed to have travelled from mainland Asia through
the Malay Peninsula and modern-day Indonesia to Melanesia, intermixing there with
the predecessors or relatives of the Aborigines in Australia, before eventually arriving
in the Philippine archipelago. A third group (or series of groups) from Borneo and Java
moved north to what are now called the Eastern Visayas (the central Philippine
islands) and from there moved north to southern Luzon, while still others occupied
the western Visayan islands and parts of Mindanao in the south of the Philippines,
including Sulu. Thus the Philippine cultural communities, characterized by the
languages they speak, were created by diVerent patterns of settlement from a variety
of sources within mainland and island Southeast Asia. Currently it is calculated that
there are as many as 120 mutually unintelligible language varieties still present in the
Philippines, all having a common Austronesian base of the West Indonesian variety,
but divided into two main groups, Northern and Central, with twelve of the larger
languages having over a million speakers (out of a total nationwide population of 88
million).

2

The present-day population of the Philippines therefore incorporates a very

high degree of ethno-linguistic diversity spread across the archipelago of over 7,000
islands. The division among what are now called the Philippine-type languages
(likewise found in Indonesia and Taiwan) most likely took place about 2,000 years
ago, but the early migrations from southern China seem to be traceable back to
between 4500 and 5000 BC, according to present reconstructions.

2

In terms of broad ethnic divisions, the population of the Philippines is now estimated to be 95 per

cent Austronesian/Malay, 3 per cent Chinese, and 2 per cent ‘mestizo’ (mixed Chinese, Spanish, and
Austronesian). Less than 1 per cent are constituted by the earliest Negrito inhabitants of the islands.

362

A. Gonzalez

It is necessary to give some prehistory so as to make an important point. As the

foremost prose writer in the Philippines has repeatedly stated over the years, perhaps
the single biggest contribution of Spanish colonization, which dominated the
Philippines for nearly 400 years, was to (indirectly) bring about the beginnings of a
uniWcation of the very many distinct cultural communities on the islands, causing
these diverse groups to begin to think of themselves jointly as ‘Filipinos’ during the
nationalist period which occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This
resulted in the banding together of the Wrst ‘Filipinos’ who then rebelled against Spain
and established the Wrst Malolos Republic in 1898, before being recolonized by the
United States in 1902 ( Joaquin 1943: 42–8; 1977: 22–39). It was an express intention of
the Malolos constitutionalists two years after the initial revolt against Spain to include
Filipinos from all ethnic communities in the government of the country, although the
core was in fact from the eight provinces directly around Manila, and there was a
deliberate attempt to have representation from the Visayas and from the Islamic
communities in Mindanao.

There thus emerged among the educated of the elites during that period (the

‘ilustrados’) a consciousness that they were participating in a historic event as one
people, a nation, determining for themselves their form of government and electing
their national leaders. Hitherto the term ‘Filipino’ had actually been used by the
Spanish to signify those of Spanish stock who had been born and had settled in
the Philippines – ‘insulares’, as opposed to ‘peninsulares’.

3

They were the Filipinos in

the mind of the Spanish Crown, the rest of the population being simply ‘Indios’. Local
nationalists, however, now arrogated to themselves the attribute of Filipino as the
genuine, rightful inhabitants and owners of the islands. Leon Ma. Guerrero (1963),
one of the biographers of the national hero and martyr Jose Rizal, referred to him as
‘the Wrst Filipino’ under this new meaning. And it was this growing consciousness
among the ilustrados gathered at Malolos that constituted the beginnings of the
Philippine nation born of the nationalistic consciousness among these elites during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, beginning with the execution of the three
priest nationalists, Jose Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora (see Schumacher 1973).

The ilustrados, educated for the most part by Spaniards (especially the Jesuits of the

Ateneo), and including many who had studied in Spain and been inXuenced by the
liberal ideas current at the time, knew their political theory well and were intent on
proving to the world that they were ready for self-government and eventually
independence. Thus in 1898 when Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence from
Spain on June 12, he had Julian Felipe compose a Marcha Nacional, with lyrics later
being added by Jose Palma, and Gregoria de Jesus, the widow of the nationalist Andres
Bonifacio, together with other ladies, sewed together the Wrst Xag. However, as
Gonzalez (1980) narrates, the question of adopting a national language based on a
local language was not entertained by the framers of the Constitution of Biak na Bato

3

Note that the Philippines were originally named after King Philip II of Spain, las Islas Felipinas.

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363

in 1897 and the Malolos Constitution in 1898, and instead the existing, inherited
linguistic situation was simply allowed to continue, using Spanish for formal matters,
and keeping local languages for informal communication. It was not until the 1930s
that the question of selecting and promoting an indigenous language as a national
language of the Philippines was seriously considered and then put into action. In the
meantime, however, another foreign power had begun to exert its inXuence over the
development of the Philippines, and the Treaty of Paris ending the rebellion and war
against the Spanish in 1898 awarded control over the Philippines to the United States,
which had played a signiWcant military role in the defeat of the Spanish forces. Despite
subsequent, prolonged armed resistance to American rule, the Philippines thereafter
remained a colony under U.S. occupation until 1946, when full independence was
eventually gained following the end of the Second World War.

In the mid-1930s, however, independence at some point in the future seemed to be

likely, and in 1935 the oYcial status of the Philippines was changed to that of a self-
governing U.S. Commonwealth. In preparation for ultimate independence and more
immediately the switch to Commonwealth status, the fundamental law of the land
mandated a future legislature to begin the search for a national language based on one
of the indigenous existing languages. This formal direction to select and promote just
one of the many languages of the Philippines as the country’s national language did
not in fact reXect the thinking of most of those in the National Assembly at the time,
who instead had the desire for a common national language to be built out of a range
of Philippino languages. However, the wishes of other members of the Assembly were
overruled by the strong will of Manuel Quezon, the president of the new government,
who ordered the stylists who drew up the Wrst draft of the new constitution to
make the national language based on one language alone. Following such an instruc-
tion, the National Language Institute, established by the Commonwealth Congress in
1936, selected Tagalog to be the basis of the national language in 1937, and in 1939
Tagalog was oYcially proclaimed the national language of the Philippines by Quezon,
much to the disappointment of the Bisayans in the central part of the Philippines and
especially the Cebuanos. Though Tagalog had more speakers than other languages in
the Philippines, approximately 12 million, it was not so far ahead of Cebuano, which
had 10 million speakers, and there were also other languages with signiWcant popu-
lations, such as Ilocano, with 5 million speakers. The choice of Tagalog as the
exclusive base for the national language therefore seemed to confer an unfair advan-
tage on those in the north of the country, and simultaneously disadvantage speakers of
other languages in the Philippines, whose future proWciency in the national language
looked set to signiWcantly lag behind that of native Tagalog speakers. In a weak
attempt to make the selected language more acceptable it was then called Wikang
Pambansa

, ‘the national language’, in 1940 when it was Wrst taught in colleges and high

schools, and in 1959, again as a public relations move, the Secretary of Education Jose
Romero renamed it Pilipino, yet such moves failed to dispel the common view of the
national language as being simply Tagalog masquerading under a diVerent name.

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A. Gonzalez

Considerably later on, in the 1971 Constitutional Convention which Wnally drafted the
1973 Constitution, the issue of the composition and base of the national language was
taken up again, this time with more pluralist intentions. The new constitution set out
a demand and goal for the establishment by a future language academy of a new
common national language to be based not just on a single, regional language, but on
all the major languages of the Philippines. Such a language, when created, was to be
known as ‘Filipino’ and should replace Tagalog-based Pilipino. In the 1980s, Filipino
was still very much a work in progress, but in the atmosphere of heightened
nationalism and ‘people power’ at the beginning of the Aquino regime, following
the momentous toppling of the Marcos regime, the 1986 constitutional commis-
sioners took it for granted that Filipino already existed, and enthusiastically named it
as the ‘new’ national language of the Philippines. By legislation among constitutional
commissioners, what was supposed to be still in the process of formation became
accepted as reality and adopted as the national language of the Philippines.

Due to this ‘premature’ oYcial proclamation of Filipino, however, the new national

language turned out to still be heavily based on Tagalog and in fact not radically
diVerent from its predecessor Pilipino, though incorporating certain lexical items not
used in Tagalog. Filipino has furthermore essentially remained in this basic mould
through until the present day, and continues to be strongly linked to Tagalog, as
spoken in the country’s capital, Manila.

4

Nevertheless, as a result of the formal propagation of Tagalog-based Pilipino now

Filipino, twenty years later most in the country have now de facto accepted Filipino as
the national language of the Philippines, and also pragmatically as a lingua franca and
(perhaps) as an oYcial language. The major exception to this is some remaining
opposition on the part of the Cebuanos. The latter continue to point out and argue
that Filipino/Pilipino is not really diVerent from Tagalog and therefore not an impar-
tial language form that can be equally shared and acquired by all of the nation (see
Gonzalez 1991: 111–29). The problem is therefore still one of selection and legitim-
ation of Filipino as a truly national language, and, compounded with the roughshod
nature of its attempted legitimation, this has caused a clear ambivalence and lack of
universal loyalty towards it as a symbol of linguistic unity and national identity. Such a
situation existing back in 1970 triggered Jose Villa Panganiban’s lament that Pilipino
remained a language in search of a nation (paraphrasing the title of Pirandello’s play).
Thirty-Wve years after his passing away, it has to be conceded that Panganiban’s
characterization of the national language still retains much of its original validity.

Such a somewhat pessimistic assessment of the unifying power of the national

language and its lacklustre adoption as an emotive symbol of the state can be framed

4

As noted in the Wikipedia entry for Filipino language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Filipino_language>, people in the Philippines may more frequently ask strangers whether they speak
Tagalog rather than Filipino, indicating that the common, national language is essentially seen as Tagalog
rather than any separate linguistic entity, Filipino.

The Philippines

365

against a general pattern of behaviour discernible in the modern history of the
Philippines and its people. It seems that Filipinos, usually divided, get together only
in the face of a common enemy or in a deWning moment of their history. Thus, having
risen up against Spanish colonial rule at the end of the nineteenth century, we see the
members of the Malolos Constitution making their Wrst brave attempts as a national
legislative body establishing the basic law of the land and organizing the Wrst general
election of government oYcials. The next deWning moment for the country was the
Constitutional Convention of 1935 prior to the declaration of the Commonwealth
Government, and then, seven years further on, one Wnds the nation united in
resistance against the Japanese, Wrst in Bataan together with American forces, and
then in a guerrilla war waged against the Japanese. Shortly thereafter was the all-
important, self-deWning moment of the Philippine nation in its declaration of inde-
pendence from the United States in 1946. Four decades on, another point in modern
history when the people of the Philippines signiWcantly came together was to assist in
the dramatic change of government from Marcos to Aquino in the EDSA revolution
of 1986, and then once again at EDSA II when public protest against Joseph Estrada
built up to such a pitch that it was able to bring Vice-President Gloria Macapagal
Arroyo to power. What seems to be a defect in the Filipino psyche is a critical lack of
sustainability of such moments, which could carry the Filipino through a genuine
reform of personal and social life and push the country towards real development. For,
in the face of slow progress and the seeming inability of diVerent administrations to
eVect genuine prosperity and reform against graft, the Filipino regularly grows weary,
becomes cynical, and loses hope, taking positive steps only when conditions become
so bad that they have to be changed by extra-legal means. The construction and
continued maintenance of a positive national unity therefore seems to regularly elude
the members of this very mixed nation, and presents a diYcult challenge to the
success of really bonded, communal organization both in broader socio-political life
and in and through the use of language.

16.3 The Interfering Variable of the English Language

Having seen how the national language oYcially came into existence, and was
intended to be a positive indigenous resource linking up the population of the
Philippines linguistically as a nation, we will now consider how a foreign language,
English, has played a major complicating role in the development of such a process.

When the First Philippine Commission was sent to the Philippines in 1901 by

President McKinley (of the United States), one of his instructions was that local
language should be used as the primary means of education, and English as a
means of instructing the newly-colonized locals in the ways of democracy and good
government. This was repeated once more by the Second Philippine Commission and
the Secretary of War, Elihu Root, under whom the colonized territories were placed
in what was subsequently called the Bureau of Insular AVairs.

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A. Gonzalez

In the initial expansion of education during American rule, the Wrst teachers were in

fact American soldiers under a Catholic army chaplain named William McKinnon.
Subsequently, the Organic Act of 1902 was passed by the Second Philippine Commis-
sion under William Howard Taft and established a Department of Public Instruction.
Through the Bureau of Insular AVairs of the Department of War in Washington, DC,
teachers were then recruited from diVerent parts of the United States to come to the
Philippines to staV the new schools. The largest and Wrst group of teachers (600)
arrived via the USS Thomas, and the name ‘Thomasites’ has gone down in Philippine
history as a general name for the American teachers who came to the Philippines to
initially help in the education of Filipino youth.

The Wrst batch of teaching recruits were highly educated, some with MAs and

PhDs, and almost all had at least a bachelor’s degree from one of the leading colleges
and universities in the United States. However, faced with a signiWcant language
barrier, the exhortations of the First and Second Philippine Commissions concerning
use of local language as teaching medium were not implemented, as no single lan-
guage was considered widespread enough and developed enough to serve as the
common language of instruction in schools. This was consequently the beginning of
the exclusive use of English as the medium of instruction in schools. However, the
materials used for teaching were American and intended for native speakers, and the
teachers had no training in second language methodology. In the Wrst years they
furthermore made quite unsuccessful use of the ‘direct method’ of language teaching,
and only later switched to the more traditional grammar-analysis method which went
on to dominate the teaching of English for many years.

5

From the beginning,

however, the American teachers attempted to improve the results of instruction by
recruiting the help of their most able students as teachers, especially those who had
qualiWed for the equivalent of Grade 7 (the end of the elementary years, as established
by the Bureau of Public Instruction).

In all, approximately just 2,000 Thomasites arrived to serve the educational system

during the period 1901 to 1920, when the bureaucracy for practical purposes became
fully Filipino except for the top-level administrators.

6

For the most part, then, after the

initial years of ad hoc teaching and apprenticeship, day-to-day instruction came to be
carried out by Filipino teachers and middle-level administrators. Based on Sibayan’s
(1999) observations, the beginnings of Philippine English also occurred at this time, as
well as the creation of the Wrst Filipino-made textbooks (from 1919 onwards, with the
Osias readers).

As the years of American colonial rule continued and the gradual granting of

experience in democracy began with the creation of the National Assembly in 1907,

5

See Alberca (1978) for an account of these earlier years, Alberca (1994: 53–74) for a study of the

Thomasites and language teaching, and Gonzalez (2001: 51–62) for a critique of this from the viewpoint of
contemporary language-teaching methodology.

6

The Bureau of Public Instruction in fact had American administrators almost until the beginning of

the Japanese Occupation.

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367

the establishment of a representative legislature in 1916, and then the Commonwealth
in 1935, for both Filipinos and Americans the presupposed given in Philippine
education was that English would continue to be the language of the schools. This
was in fact stipulated by the Tydings–McDuYe Act in 1934 establishing the Com-
monwealth in 1935 and subsequently the Republic in 1945.

As discussed in the previous section, the 1935 Constitution also established a

mandate for the establishment of a National Language Institute to select one of the
Philippine languages as the basis of the Philippine language, and this resulted in the
choice of Tagalog for this purpose, despite much opposition from the Cebuanos.
Tagalog was then made the national language in 1939 and supported by the creation
of a grammar and a dictionary,

7

satisfying preconditions which had been imposed

on the declaration of a national language. A Presidential Act mandated the teaching
of Tagalog in fourth-year high school and as a course in the Teacher Education
Program beginning in 1940. Subsequently Tagalog became an oYcial language during
the Japanese Period, although English continued to be used even by the Japanese
Occupation Administrators. When independence was Wnally attained on 4 July 1946,
Tagalog was taught as a subject at all levels of elementary and secondary schools, but
English continued to be the language of instruction for all subjects except the Tagalog
class.

8

Renamed Pilipino in 1959 by the then Secretary of Education Jose Romero, the

national language was in time mandated by the Department of Education to be taught
as a subject not only in the ten years of basic schooling but for one year at the tertiary
level. The period of intense student nationalism beginning in 1969, which was cut
short by the declaration of Martial Law in 1972, also saw the expansion of Pilipino as a
medium of instruction at the university level in some universities (largely at the
University of the Philippines, the centre of student activism and nationalism in
the country). In recognition of this clamour, the Department of Education under
the martial-law regime of Ferdinand Marcos established a bilingual scheme for schools
whereby English would be used for mathematics and science while continuing to be
taught as a subject; the other subjects (mostly social studies/social science subjects)
were to be taught in Filipino. This policy was established in 1974 and has continued on
into the twenty-Wrst century.

Even today, though, there is much ambivalence with regard to this aspect of

language policy, as made evident and discussed in various evaluations of the bilingual
scheme that have been completed (Gonzalez 1984, Gonzalez and Sibayan 1988).
Considering Wrst the use and teaching of the national language, on the one hand,
outside the area of education, it can be noted that the use of Filipino has become quite
widespread in much of the country at least for social discourse of an informal nature,

7

This was actually an English–Tagalog bilingual wordlist.

8

In fact, English was sometimes used in Tagalog language classes too. At least in the Wrst decade of

teaching Tagalog, English was used as the metalanguage of instruction for class management and
explanations, and exercises were prescribed for translation from Tagalog to English and vice versa.

368

A. Gonzalez

and the mass media have now largely turned to Filipino with only the print medium
still predominantly in English (Media Factbook 2000). However, on the other hand, at
the level of basic education, there have been steps backwards rather than forwards. In
Region VII, Cebu and Central Visayas, social studies is now taught in English rather
than Filipino, and the dominance of English is once more reasserting itself in the
system, going back to the period preceding 1974, the declaration of the bilingual
scheme. While there were also initiatives to use Filipino as the medium of instruction
in many subjects at the tertiary level (Bautista and Gonzalez 1988: 111–62) these
initiatives are currently no longer operative and the whole system of tertiary educa-
tion is practically all in English except for Filipino Language courses.

In the meantime, standards of English are also perceived to have ‘deteriorated’, and

the main popular target of blame for this is the bilingual education scheme. Here
it should be added that this perception that bilingual education is failing to produce
competent speakers of English may be widespread among the public, but it is in
fact most probably not warranted, and not supported by empirical data. In a study
carried out on levels of English and Filipino in a range of schools in 1986, it was found
that well-run schools actually performed extremely highly in the teaching of both
languages, while poorly-run schools did not do a good job of either. Hence, the
predominant factors in language-teaching success in the Philippine education system
were found to be socio-economic, with the quality of teaching in more aZuent
schools being higher due to the presence of more competent teachers, and success
in language teaching was consequently not directly linked to the bilingual education
scheme itself.

As changes have continued, there is now mass education in the Philippines. Almost

all children begin schooling, but unfortunately many drop out after only one or two
years, with some more dropping out at the higher grades, and estimates made in
2001/2002 indicate that out of 100 Wrst-grade students who begin school, only about
67 Wnish Grade 6. As a result of the wider availability of public education, the
percentage of the population with some knowledge of English is continuing to
increase. Though oYcial data on numbers of second-language speakers of English
has not been recently collected and made available, a small commissioned survey in
1994 found that 56 per cent of Filipinos claim (by self-report) to be able to speak
English, 74 per cent claim to understand English, 73 per cent claim to read English,
and 50 per cent claim to be able to write English (see Gonzalez 2000: 1–9). Since there
were no measures of English achievement prior to nationwide testing which began in
1973, it is diYcult to say whether or not overall real mastery of the language has
generally been on the increase or the decrease, but the testimony of teachers and
administrators and the poor showing of applicants for employment in tests of English
(especially in writing and speaking) seem to indicate a large percentage of people
whose competence is less than adequate for academic learning. What is furthermore
disconcerting about the situation is that many instructors who teach in English and
others who teach English as a subject seem themselves to have poor reading skills and

The Philippines

369

even poorer writing skills, and hence fail to serve as appropriate role models for the
acquisition of English competence (Gonzalez 1998: 487–525).

In spite of this, however, there is a clamour for more English, and for Wnding means

to teach the subject better, rather than a call to think in terms of a diVerent kind of
language-teaching paradigm, where for the sake of improving and maximizing
content achievement children might be taught in a language they are more familiar
with, rather than having to learn a second language on the Wrst day of school. Such an
alternative approach to language in early education was present in initiatives in 1998–
2001 to use the dominant vernaculars and lingua francas as bridging languages (a
policy which had earlier been undertaken from 1957 to 1974) and to use Filipino for
content instruction in the lower grades, with English being taught as a subject after
initial literacy and then used as a medium of instruction in a bilingual scheme from
Grade 3 or 4 on. Presently, however, emphasis seems to remain on the increased, early
acquisition of English in the educational system, even though this may be diYcult for
students to succeed in.

The general dominance of English (in certain areas of life) has continued over the

post-independence years under manifestly pro-English Chief Executives of the coun-
try beginning with Marcos, followed by Aquino, Ramos, and Estrada, and now under
Macapagal, and the constitution of 1987 recognizes English as one of the two oYcial
languages of the Philippines, alongside Filipino, which also has the symbolically
signiWcant status of national language. The desire for all socio-economic levels to
attain English competence for their children has additionally become even more
dramatic with the encouragement, beginning during the Estrada Administration,
for workers from the Philippines to go abroad, aided in their marketability to a
signiWcant extent by their ability to speak English, to easily communicate with others,
and to receive technical instruction in a language of wider communication. As of 2002,
the resulting annual income passing through government channels from overseas
workers has been oYcially recorded to be as much as US$8 billion, and certainly
amounts to even more when one factors in other informal channels for sending
foreign exchange to relatives and family. This source of foreign currency consequently
ranks as higher than that from any other signiWcant ‘export’ from the Philippines and
has assumed a critical importance for the economy of the country.

Thus, while Filipino is the national language and while Filipinos generally now

accept it as such (except for the die-hard Cebuanos conWned mostly in Cebu Province,
and this partially for political advantage by local Cebuano politicians), the Filipino’s

W

rst priority in language learning for life is English, not Filipino, for Filipino is only

used for political campaigning and as a national-level lingua franca, whereas it is the
local vernacular that the Filipino commonly uses for his everyday familial communi-
cation, for worship, and as a local/regional lingua franca to carry on communication
at an informal level, and English that he switches to for higher-order cognitive
activities, for university studies, for diplomacy, and as a language of wider communi-
cation in any international dealings. It is also English that critically provides him

370

A. Gonzalez

access to better opportunities of employment (and signals the likely attainment of
higher socio-economic status).

The motivation for language use and learning in a situation like this is one of

pragmatism; languages in Philippine society are in complementary distribution
according to functions and needs. If the educated Filipino elite feels more comfortable
using English rather than Filipino even for communication in the family,

9

and if he

uses Filipino only to communicate with people at a lower socio-economic level and
for informal communications, is there really a feeling of identity with the language
and with the aspiration that Filipino is the linguistic symbol of unity and national
identity? And is this lack of loyalty to a language of identity a symbolic indicator of the
kind of ‘damaged culture’ that Fallows (1987) speaks of or the lack of ‘a crystallized
nationalism’ that Kikuchi (1991) describes?

What is evident in the Philippines, as borne out by empirical evidence from various

surveys, is that the Filipino does not equate nationalism and love of country with
loyalty to a language but takes a pragmatic view of the utility of language in his life.
He considers symbols of nationhood such as the national language, a national Xower,
a national costume, a national cuisine, a national anthem, and its music as important,
but he does not consider these signiWcant enough to be traded for an asset that he
considers essential for commercial and educational success.

On the other hand, in deWning moments of the existence of the body politic, the

Filipino has shown clear unity and identiWcation with a larger social and political body
beyond himself, as in the Malolos Congress of 1898, the Philippine–American War of
1899–1901, his united opposition to Japanese Occupation from 1942 to 1945, the majority
consensus against the continuation of American military bases (subsequently made a
reality in 1992), the glorious moment of the EDSA Revolution of 22–25 February 1986,
the euphoria with the Aquino government in the initial post-Marcos period, and the
united opposition to Estrada on the charges of graft and corruption in 2001.

If there is a generalization that the sympathetic (rather than scathing) outside

observer can legitimately oVer about the Philippine situation here, it is that this
consciousness of unity and identity at speciWc points in time is ultimately just not
sustained enough (up to present) for nationalism and its symbols to create the kind of
development of the country as a whole that the Philippines still needs to generate, and
that so many of our neighbours in Southeast Asia seem to be well on the way to
attaining.

16.4 Final Theoretical Considerations

In the social scientist’s generalizations about concepts such as nation, state, nation-
state, and the indicators of these diVerent types of social units as manifested by certain

9

See Gonzalez (1989: 359–73) for a putative computation of the (small) percentage of Filipino families

that use English for their family communications.

The Philippines

371

symbols and certain behavioural indicators, the prevailing paradigm seems to be that
there are clear stages in the evolution of the nation-state and its uniWcation and
identity. Initially, diVerent tribes exist as individual cultural communities. Through
living together, aided perhaps by a common habitable space, proximity, commonal-
ities in religion, a common enemy (an occupier or a colonial power or a conqueror),
and a common historical experience, these individual tribes and cultural communities
may act together and generate a spirit of unity against a common enemy. Subse-
quently such groups may merge into a larger unit, through various means constitute
themselves into a state, choosing a basic charter, a structure of government, and, if
aVected by ideas of democracy and contemporary government, electing representa-
tive oYcials. Very much depending on how eVective the latter are, and how far they
can create a feeling of oneness among the people, manage their tribal self-interests,
balance their desires, and above all, manage success for the populace, the state may
develop more and more into a nation, a political entity with a population having a
perception of itself as a common, uniWed people. Symbols may be chosen to
strengthen this unity and create a clearer identity, such as a common language
(which may have to be selected from a range of possible options), a national anthem,
other minor symbols such as a Xag, cuisine, costume, and subsequent studies about
the roots and self-identity of the people (this being the function of a university and a
centre of culture).

What has been shown by experience and accepted in the paradigm is that nation-

states can fail in the sense that the uniWcation of various groups of people is seen as a
purely legal and technical structuring, and does not establish a genuine feeling and
perception of unity. There may be a lack of identiWcation with a distinct identity, and
divisions within the body politic which prevent it from becoming a full nation-state, or
even lead to its collapse and a deterioration into a situation where there is no longer
any real central government and instead a return to a state of mixed tribes and
warlords. The symbols then become inoperative and lose their meaningfulness.

In the interests of maintaining unity, however, compromises can be made which in

eVect depart from the existing model. For example, there can be a federation with
autonomy for each tribe, or there can be a national feeling of identity but a weak
central government (such as some claim for Japan), or an ideal merging of state and
nation (as in France), or a strong central government without genuine nationhood (as
in the artiWcial state of Yugoslavia that Marshal Tito put together). In less than ideal
conditions, the symbols of nationhood and identity may become weaker and less
signiWcant. In the case of Singapore, although the national language is Malay and is
used for symbolic purposes, the operative languages are English and now Mandarin
(instead of the former dialects or separate languages that the Singaporeans spoke,
Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese – Simpson, this volume, chapter 17). There can also be
compromise and the development of a multilingual state such as Switzerland and its
cantons, or the larger, almost continent-like state of India, where a trilingual policy is
encouraged by the government – Hindi for the nation-state, English as a special

372

A. Gonzalez

language of wider communication, and a variant, regional language for everyday local
communication (Amritavalli and Jayaseelan, this volume, chapter 3). The situation is
quite similar in the Philippines, where in eVect there is a de facto trilingual linguistic
situation: the local vernaculars (regional languages) are used in the home, the
neighbourhood and even the province, Filipino occurs as the national lingua franca,
and English is present as the language of wider communication, the language of
economic mobility and employment, and the language of an elite who have not really
fully merged with the masses in terms of their feelings of identity.

Perhaps one should not fault the Filipino for his lack of monolithic cultural identity

and his regular use of languages identiWed with diVerent cultures. Perhaps one should
accept the reality that, in the same way that anthropologists see languages as
eVectively manifesting many aspects of pidginization, so also all cultures are never
pure, unless isolated for many generations, and cultures are in eVect amalgams of
diVerent subcultures, with some constituting cultures more diVerent than others in
the proximate space. What we have in many world situations are pidgins which
become creolized and cultural mixing which sooner or later acquires an identity of its
own. In this regard, some societies are open and porous to outside inXuences, while
others are much more closed. A good example of the latter is pre-modern Japan, an
example of the former the Philippines.

Philippine cultural life is a visible, thorough mix. Filipinos are themselves a broad

mixture of Malay, Chinese, Spanish, and American, and likewise their culture is a
mixture of the cultures of all of these groups. Linguistically, too, there were earlier
mixed pidgins in the Philippines such as Bago in Northern Luzon and Chabacano in
Spanish settlements and perhaps, in the future, a Filipino English pidgin,

10

but right

now the situation is one of multilingualism with a complementarity of functions. The
Filipino has chosen Tagalog-based (Pilipino) Filipino as his targeted linguistic symbol
of unity and national identity for reasons of legal and symbolic convenience, but
across a broad range of domains in everyday life he chooses to be multilingual rather
than monolingual, and hence adopts a mixed linguistic life. Very similar are also his
cuisine, his lifestyle, his art, his music, and his other expressions of nationhood – each
a mixture rather than a pure entity. This pidginization explains the Filipino’s roots.
Does it also explain his lack of success in the management of his politics, his
government, and his economic aVairs? Does it explain his general ability to function
outside but not inside the body politic? If it does not, then the diYculty remains to

W

nd some more reWned and sensitive way to predict his regular individual success but

common social failure, and Wnd roots for this phenomenon in matters other than
culture and language and symbols of nationhood and identity.

10

Code-mixing of English and Filipino is an increasing trend, especially among members of the

younger generations.

The Philippines

373