BY DR. JOSE MA. EDUARDO P. DACUDAO
I CALL FOR the manager. It is shifting time and so all the service crew for the next shift are also present. I ask the manager to confirm if Tagalog is the standard language of Jollibee Butuan. Probably worried at the thought of an irate customer creating a public scandal, she answers something unclear that I take for a yes.
I then ask her:
If Tagalog is the standard language here in Jollibee-Butuan, what does that mean for Binisaya? That Binisaya is below standard? Isn’t that what you are saying?
Binisaya is a below-standard language, that’s what you are saying!
The manager, who was about to say something, suddenly fell silent.
I direct my next statements to all of them, including all the service crew, who were staring at us. I tell them you are all Bisaya. We are all Bisaya. How dare you discriminate against our own culture, to claim that we are below standard? Let this be a lesson to you, that there are still Bisaya who take pride and dignity in our culture, as you should.
Knowing that McDonald’s Butuan competes with them, I add:
Do you know that this is not the case in McDonald’s? The service crew there regularly uses Binisaya.
The manager apologizes.
But… the goodly feeling after a life-saving operation is gone. Only sickening emptiness abides.
I have seen a life saved. Moments later, I see the Visayan people’s identity dying in public, and no one would have lifted a finger or raised a voice to save it. See ye thus life for a patient in the privacy of a hospital; but death for a language, the patient’s language, the crew’s language, our language, in a public eatery across the street in the same portentous hour. Why the double standard?
I wanted to celebrate life. Yet I see Manila-based teachings and institutions killing our cultures all the time, day by day.
Like a human life once gone, a language once dead is gone forever; and like the shaping of a unique human being, no one normally can create a language and the ethnolinguistic people it defines. Once a people is dead our descendants will never see the bonds that they formed, nor ever hear the melody of their tongue; and all the good that they have done and would do as a people would be but forgotten footnotes in history and dreams that never happened.
(Note: To Visayans frequenting Jollibee branches in the Visayas-Mindanao area, please remind the service crew and managers to change their uppity chic ways that in truth just marginalize our native Visayan cultures, which is also theirs, should you see them discriminating against the Visayan languages.)/PN
