BY DR. JOSE MA. EDUARDO PALU-AY DACUDAO
There are at present more than 6,000 distinct languages. Each defines an ethnolinguistic people of the world. Each week, one or two of them die out, usually due to years of discriminatory policies of governments that promote only the language of their capitals and centers. These languages differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
Each language offers unique concepts and ways of expressing them, and thus unique perspectives (points of view), besides defining the very peoples of the world. Each of them is priceless and irreplaceable, a treasure that humanity can hardly afford to lose.
Our goal is to save the Philippines’ indigenous dying languages (which is actually everything except Tagalog, since it is the only one that is being taught in schools).
We advocate for a Multiple Official Languages Model as the best for a multiethnic country such as the Philippines.
Provisions One: A minority language in its indigenous areas must be taught in schools in those areas as a subject, in order to prevent it from dying out, at the very least among the minority people that it defines and speaks it.
Provision Two: There still are widely spoken major lingua franca in the Philippines aside from Tagalog – Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Naga Bicolano, Waray, Kapampangan, Pangasinense, (apart from more than 150 other minority Philippine languages).
In a pro-diversity model, at the very least, subjects on the major languages listed above are offered in all regions, and students choose two or three of them (plus their own indigenous minority language, if they happen to be a member of a minority ethnolinguistic group, as stipulated in Provision One above).
Thus, Tagalog school children learn to speak at least two other Philippine languages, such as Ilocano and Kapampangan. Or Bicolano and Waray. Or Hiligaynon and Cebuano. And so on. Ditto for the other ethnolinguistic peoples of the Philippines.
This is not something new, as some European countries teach multiple languages as subjects in their schools. Thus language subjects shall replace the useless multiple ‘Filipino’ subjects (what these ‘Filipino’ subjects really do is to turn non-Tagalogs into Tagalogs) in elementary and high school.
Provision Three: Subjects on Math, the Sciences, and English literature, all of them to be taught in English, shall be retained and even expanded and increased (again by replacing the useless ‘Filipino’ subjects).
Apart from the fact that English is the language of international science, technology, commerce, and diplomacy, and of overseas workers that keep our economy afloat, and a language that has functioned as a neutral leveling tongue in the Philippines for more than a hundred years, English is the language of learning.
Mastery of English in subjects on Math, the Sciences, and Literature makes one a learned person in the present setting… everywhere in the world./PN
