Kidapawan’s local historian makes a case for the removal of Filipino as a core subject in college.
By Karlo Antonio G. David
When the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) acted last year to move Filipino as a subject from college to the reformed basic education curriculum, the Tanggol Tagalog—rabid advocates of Tagalog as the national language—saw the move as an attack on their national language, took it to the courts, and denounced it as unconstitutional.
The lawsuit is the latest move in what has been a movement by Tagalog advocates of agitating people into a paranoid and xenophobic nationalism, portraying all forms of change to Tagalog’s privileged position as “threats to national identity.”
The SC’s consistent response to the case, however, has been to point out the obvious: CHED is merely moving the teaching of the language down the academic ladder, in order to free up more space in higher education. Pursuant to Article XIV Sec. 6 and 7 of the Constitution, Tagalog, masquerading as “Filipino,” remains the national language and, by virtue of that, it is still the only Philippine language being taught in schools across the archipelago.
Just this tiny bit of reduction from Tagalog’s privileges as hegemonic language, and already theT anggol Tagalogs are up in arms decrying that their national language is being “abolished.” To the privileged, indeed, equality feels like oppression.
For far too long, the situation has been like this. Since Manuel L. Quezon invented the concept of the National Language, the Tagalog language—renamed “Filipino” and with the tokenist but unfulfilled promise of creolization to sugarcoat the hegemony—has been imposed as the national language of the Philippines, giving it a privilege denied of other Philippine languages.
From the constitution to mass media, Tagalog has been the language of power, rivaled only by another hegemonic tongue, English.
Other languages are dismissed as “dialects,” relegated to the illegitimacy of the pedestrian, andi n many schools, students are penalized a peso per word they say in their “vernacular.”
Under its alias of “Filipino,” Tagalog is the only indigenous language taught as a subject in schools all over the country in almost all levels of education. While it is compulsory as a subject in the heartlands of such other Philippine languages as Cebuano and Maguindanaon, none of these other languages are taught in the Katagalugan area.
We are united as a country, but really only in Tagalog terms.
In a fairer Philippines, these Tanggol Tagalogs would not have been the petitioners in court.
They would be the defendants, tried for linguicide and violation of our right to speak our many other languages, a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Because no matter how much they try to make “regionalism” a bad word, the reality is that we are a country of diverse languages and peoples. We are an archipelago of over a hundred tongues, and this “isang bansa, isang wika” ideology has served to deny us of that beautifully complex identity for far too long.
I am inclined to say good riddance for the SC ruling, and I am also one with the advocates of multilingualism and of the other Philippine languages who see this as a triumph: It has already been well argued elsewhere how this is an opportunity which allows other Philippine languages to be used in higher education, both as medium and as actual subject, if only as an elective.
But I know, as many of these multilingualism advocates also know, that it is progress too little, too late. We must demand for more.
To put it bluntly, we must kill “Filipino.”
We must purge it from the education system, We must remove it from the Constitution. We must erase it from the public imagination.
We must kill this conformist homogenizing fiction that there is somehow only one way of being a proper citizen of this country, the way that speaks Tagalog.
And we must build in its place a multilingual and inclusive language arrangement, one which does justice to the fact that we are a nation of many peoples and tongues, united by political fate.
We must kill this lie of a national identity that is “Filipino,” and start building in its place a nation true to its multiplicity, one which celebrates our diversity and not see it as “being divided,” where children are encouraged to learn and appreciate the tongues of their ancestors and those of their neighbors—a nation with the language arrangement of the many, not the one.
We are not just a Tagalog-speaking nation. We are the nation of the Chavacanos and the Kapampangans, of the Meranaw and the Monuvu. We are the nation of that great polyglot Jose Rizal, who once said that man “is multiplied by the number of languages he speaks.”
We are a nation destined to speak our hundred tongues. It is time to pursue that destiny.
This articles was first published on the September 2019 issue of the Philippine Panorama.