BY DR. JOSE MA. EDUARDO P. DACUDAO
DURING my first year in Butuan, I remember that the sidewalks in the center of the city were plain cement. Then several months ago, the City Government tore them up and replaced them with the same old cement, but this time with red-colored bricks embedded in them.
These bricked sidewalks offered the same convenience to the residents of Butuan. People walked on them, just as they walked on the old plain pavements, except of course that they looked like red bricks embedded in cement.
It also amazed me that Butuan had three overpasses in the middle of the City, in spite of a virtually non-existent traffic problem. People naturally did not use them. Who would trouble themselves with climbing a two story tall overpass when he could simply walk across a street that had little traffic?
Building overpasses and paving sidewalks with brick would cost millions of pesos. Likewise, teaching Binutuanon as an academic subject in school to all the youth of Butuan would also cost millions of pesos, in terms of stipends for the teachers and reproducing a Butuanon syllabus. (Incidentally, local teachers would like this as it would provide additional income for them.)
Now Binutuanon is dying. At present, it is only spoken as lingua franca in one baranggay in Butuan. Teaching Binutuanon as an academic subject in elementary and high schools offers the only way to save it for the next generations of Butuanons.
Here is the million peso question. If one had 10 million pesos in the offing, where would one spend it? Building pedestrian overpasses that pedestrians do not need, or bricking up pavements that get walked on the same as the plain old cement ones, or preserving Binutuanon for the future?
If one were to ask me, I would unhesitatingly answer that the money is best spent teaching Binutuanon.
Fifty years in the future, no one would miss a few overpasses not built, but a dead Butuanon language would be missed forever. For 10 million pesos, one could not resurrect a dead language, although one could start preserving a dying but still extant one with it. The truth is that there is no price for a language that has existed for more than a millennium, and all throughout this time has defined the Butuanon people of their ethnic identity.
Similarly, every time you hear and speak Binisaya here in Iloilo, keep in mind that what you are speaking is the priceless part of our culture that keeps our ethnic identity as Ilonggos alive. Remember that whenever some arrogant nobody who just happens to visit from Manila downgrades our language or some show-off Ilonggo DJ pretends that he does not know how to speak his own language. They are like swine trampling a priceless pearl in the mud.
Politicians should also keep our priceless languages in mind. Fifty years from now, it will be the politicians who were responsible for preserving our languages who would be remembered, not those who built infrastructures in order to impress the citizenry into voting for them.
The soul of a culture is its language. Those who save it will be remembered by that culture forever./PN
