LONDON—When you’re startled, what do you blurt out?
This is the most fool-proof way of determining what language comes “naturally” to someone, as I found out a couple of mornings ago.
I was having breakfast when a man’s head suddenly popped up outside my window. Just his head, you understand–I live on the second floor.
Guess what I exclaimed in that moment of surprise and terror. It wasn’t “bloody hell” or “oh, my god.” It was the crispiest “P*&^ng inaaaahh!” that ever reverberated in north London.
The man turned out to be the window cleaner. I’m glad he didn’t understand the stream of filthy Tagalog that issued from my mouth as I fled the kitchen.
I wonder what James Soriano would exclaim if we crept up behind him and yelled, “Bulaga!” I bet my pwet he screams “Shet!”
What was it that annoyed me so much about his article (read the article here)? It’s not that he declares English to be his “preferred” language. That’s pointing out the obvious: English remains the aspirational language for the Filipino middle and professional classes. I think he was candid enough to admit that he is a product of a society and an educational system that reinforce that colonial mindset. Aren’t we all?
No, what shocked me was his blithe description of his cosseted reality: the drivers, the maids, the sheltered upbringing that is so divorced from the lives of most Pinoys.
It’s not a pretension like many suspect; we all know people who live like that. Still, it doesn’t make it less jarring. I’m always astonished at how this illusion of separateness is cultivated in a country where slums abut the most exclusive villages, where poverty literally surrounds everyone. How can we begin to change all this when we can’t even speak to each other?
I think it’s a good thing that James is reflecting on his experience through the lens of language; I’m sure many young people in similar circumstances don’t even question it. Sarap pagkukutusan! (Go ahead, try to translate that into English.)
My own upbringing was vastly different but like James, I also tussled with the question of language. Like many Pinoys, I grew up in a linguistically eclectic household. My parents spoke Ilocano and Pangasinan to each other but spoke English in their professional lives. My maternal grandmother spoke Aklanon, Ilocano and Spanish. Tagalog wasn’t really spoken at home until my siblings and I (all born and raised in Manila) were old enough to learn it from the streets and from television.
You can imagine the comic potential in this situation. My mother would announce that we were having utong (string beans in Ilocano) for dinner. My father, when disturbed from his nap or his reading, would suddenly blurt out, “Antutan? (Anto itan. What’s that? What’s going on? in Pangasinan.)
We would howl with laughter. My father, who spoke respectable Tagalog, was mystified by our glee until he learned the Tagalog word for f@cking. From his kids.
It was my mother’s idea to speak English to us at home. Her theory was that we’d pick up Tagalog anyway as we grew up, as we had picked up Ilocano and Pangasinan.
Tagalog was not her first language anyway while she had a degree in English. So why train us in a language in which she was not fluent?
The technique had its ups and downs. We moved to Novaliches when I was about four years old, and whenever the neighborhood kids saw me coming, they’d announce, “Eto na si spokening dollar.”
But as my mother predicted, I picked Tagalog up in no time. I learned it to make new friends; it was down to socialization more than education.
By the time I went to school, I was fluent in Tagalog. But by then it had morphed into something formal and daunting: Filipino. Suddenly, there was syntax and grammar to worry about, and it was made clear to me that my kalye Tagalog was deficient for academic purposes.
Unlike James, my formal education in Filipino ended in high school. At university, I got away with having just one subject taught in Filipino. One. I learned more from watching LVN films on television and reading communist propaganda.
I’ve since explored Filipino on my own. I want to keep the language I know, a language spoken and written in a way I recognize, talking about events and ideas that are alive to me.
So after all that, is Filipino now my “preferred” language? No. I write in English because it’s the one I’ve mastered. (Besides, I haven’t got much of a choice here in England.)
I’ve tried writing in Filipino and I have discovered that I can do screenplays and Facebook status updates, that’s it. I’ve accepted that.
What’s my “first” language then? This question is frequently asked of me in this country and I no longer know the answer. If it’s a matter of chronology (what I learned first), then that would be English. If it’s what comes out of my mouth when I see a head floating outside my window, it’s Tagalog.
Ah. But language do I think in? Well, it depends on what I’m thinking about. It’s difficult to think about technology in Tagalog, and impossible to contemplate aswangs in English. I use what works.
Since most English people are monolingual, they don’t get this seemingly schizoid shifting from one language and one thought process to another. I, on the other hand, cannot imagine myself using just one language all the time, forever. That’s like having a teaspoon in your hand when there’s a banquet spread before you. Attack with all available cutlery!
I had a recent online exchange with some friends where we asked each other the English equivalents of certain Tagalog words. We could fine none for words like mapakla, alimuom, dabog. The last, I explained lengthily to my husband, is the act of stomping about and muttering to yourself because you’re in a bad mood. He was as puzzled by the word as by the gesture–I guess Englishmen don’t make dabog. They go into a “strop,” which is not as dramatic, or throw a “tantrum,” which is over the top.
What about when you thump someone on the head with your knuckles (kutos)? More puzzlement. I’ve been told it’s called a “noogie” in American English, but that’s apparently unheard of in British English.
The other way around, what’s Tagalog for “serendipity”? Or “bluff” (when playing cards)?
We have what monolingual societies will never have: at least two caches of words to express things that no one language can. Add to that our regional languages, plus Taglish and baklese, and here we are: a people with minds and tongues nimble enough to deploy multiple vocabularies and conceptual frameworks. We can speak to each other and we can speak to the world. But only if we value and learn these languages as best we can.
I’ve met so many Pinoys in the Philippines and elsewhere who insist on speaking atrocious English even if they can speak Tagalog perfectly well. Puede ba? Wersh-wersh kayo dyan, wrong gramming naman.
Then you have the purists who think their anachronistic version of Filipino is the only acceptable and patriotic form of the language. Some would even have us renounce English and regional languages altogether.
Hay naku, there is no need to think in binary terms here. English is a global language; there is no escaping that. We need it. But we also need to embrace and master the languages of our instincts, whatever they may be. Don’t worry, it won’t fracture us any further, we’re wired for this! The more, the manier.
I guess this has become more important to me because I’m a foreigner in this country trying to cling to what is mine. Filipino is not just a language I speak, it is who I am. It is the Macario Sakay, the bolera, the Nora Aunor, the aktibista and the bastos in me. It is that one bit of myself that remains unconquered, uncensored and untranslatable.
Find the indio in you, James. He’s far cleverer and more resilient than you have been led to believe.
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By: Carla Montemayor
Source: Newsbreak, Aug. 29, 2011
To view the original article, click here.
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