I was born in Pampanga, but raised in Manila. I’m part of that quarter of the population whose mother tongue is Tagalog, though I can understand a bit of Kapampangan - enough to listen in on my mother’s conversations anyway. I take pride in my bilingualism, and like to think that I am affected by its benefits. But lately, I’ve been wondering about the depth ignored by “bilingualism”, a term that just seems too dichotomous to describe this weird intersection that I’m sitting in.
“Born bilingual”
The Philippines is a bit of an unusual country. We were a Spanish colony for over 300 years, and this heavily influenced our customs and our language. The Spanish relinquished their control of us to the United States - funny how colonialism works, huh? - at the turn of the 20th century.
The Philippines is a bit of an unusual country. We were a Spanish colony for over 300 years, and this heavily influenced our customs and our language. The Spanish relinquished their control of us to the United States - funny how colonialism works, huh? - at the turn of the 20th century.
The American influence was felt the greatest in our education system. They set up schools, imported teachers and English became the medium of instruction. My grandparents were educated under that system. Even after we became independent from the Americans, my parents were educated in English, too.
I was “born bilingual”. I was exposed to so much Western media even as a baby, that it wasn’t hard not to be at least conversational in English by the time I entered preschool. No matter how hard I think about it, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know English. I learned how to read in English before I even read a storybook in Tagalog!
Even if we spoke Tagalog at home, we still watched American movies and TV shows. Filipino media was produced heavily in English, too. If magazines and newspapers were to be taken seriously, they’d be written in English. When we watched Filipino serial dramas - known as teleserye - the characters spoke Taglish, which is Tagalog infused with English. Taglish was the natural way of conversation in my middle-class neighbourhood in southern Metro Manila.
I still struggle to form sentences without at least one English word in it. And on the rare occasions that I do, the words feel funny and incomplete in my mouth.
Unconsciously privileging English
I grew up in Manila. Filipino1 was a compulsory subject in all levels of education, but I didn’t care about doing well in it as much as I did with my other subjects - and I was amazing at school. I won (English) spelling competitions just about every year, yet I still don’t know the difference between the usage of ng and nang. When we had to write reading reports, I would put so much effort into writing my English one about the latest book I bought over the weekend, yet for my Filipino report, I’d write something half-assed about a short story we read in class.
It wasn’t like my school encouraged us to hold the Filipino language in high regard. After all, we had two separate subjects for English - Language Arts and Reading - and only one for Filipino. Essentially, we were getting eighty minutes of English language education a day and only forty minutes of Filipino. English is also the medium of instruction in all the other subjects.2 How’s that for priorities?
I used to hate speaking Tagalog. I wanted to be “English-speaking”, like some of the kids at my school. I didn’t want to sound like a batang kalye3 like my mother often teased whenever she heard me talking to my friends. Whenever we went to the US on holiday, I got on the plane praying I’d have gotten rid of the Tagalog in my system by the time I returned. Of course, that never happened.
Today, I am a proud Tagalog speaker. But I’ve realised that my bilingualism isn’t a dichotomy. It's a spectrum.
Code-switching
If anything, I know that language is fluid. Not just in a macro sense, as discussed in the thinkpieces written after the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is announced, but also in a micro sense, with the way we, as individuals, change the way we talk to different people over the course of a day.
The first time I heard this term was from my mother, after I marvelled at how a six-year-old boy switched from speaking to me in English to speaking to his brothers in Tagalog not even ten seconds later. As a linguistic term, code-switching was exactly what I just described. It’s someone moving from one language (or language variant or dialect) to another, usually in the same conversation. Taglish, by this definition, is a form of code-switching.
As both a colonial product and a part of the Filipino diaspora, my experience of code-switching can be best summed up by this NPR article by Gene Demby, in which he writes:
While I was thinking about writing this post, I found myself ruminating over how much I switch codes over the course of the day. Some mornings I wake up thinking in Tagalog, while other days I wake up thinking in English. I unconsciously move back and forth between Taglish and English while speaking to my family. The English I speak around them - and around our Filipino family friends - is largely Philippine English, particularly in terms of cadence and accent. When I’m talking to my younger Filipino friends, most of whom grew up in New Zealand, I shift to a slightly different code. Amongst ourselves, we have a tendency to speak Englog, which is English peppered with Tagalog expressions. In both situations, I talk a lot faster, a lot livelier.
However, it’s a different story outside the confines of the Filipino community. I’m a Politics student at university, and it’s a discipline that calls for plenty of class discussion. In situations like these, I assert myself as much as possible. My New Zealand English is cranked up to the most prestigious register that I could muster, and I’ve impressed - if not intimidated - many people with my command of their language. It’s something I’ve observed from my four years of high school debating, but white people never stop being surprised that a brown girl is schooling them in English.
Outside an academic or a formal setting, but still outside the Filipino community, I switch codes again. When I’m with friends who aren’t Filipino, I speak New Zealand English, but one that reflects the neighbourhood I live in. My “informal” New Zealand English not only has Filipino influences, but also Polynesian influences. My cadence is a lot more varied, slowing down and speeding up in between clauses.
The funny thing is, where I’m conscious of my code switching at home and my code switching at university, I actually never noticed that I spoke like this until I graduated from my West Auckland high school and met people who didn’t live there. Does that mean “West Auckland English” is my “default code”? Is a default code even a must-have?
Our use of language reflects who we are as people. Significantly, it also reflects how we navigate the different parts of our identities in our daily interactions. As a bilingual person who splits my time between Filipino and non-Fiilpino settings, code-switching reveals different facets of my personality. I can be the polite and charming granddaughter at a family gathering or I can be the fast-talking brown girl with the wry sense of humour among my uni friends.
The more we tap into our cultural identities, the more our codes change to accommodate it. Check out this One News feature from six years ago, where they discuss how a stronger sense of New Zealand identity has created a distinct variety of English.
Languages are fascinating. Most people who enjoyed studying languages in school can attest to that. They’re fluid. They have funny words and odd grammatical quirks. And at the bottom of it all, languages evolve because we do. They are the garments we continually alter to fit us a little better every time we change.
1 Filipino is the prestige register of Tagalog, which originated from the dialect of the highly educated upper middle class in Manila.
2 Except for civics/social studies, but that’s only taught in Filipino until Grade 6, then it’s English from then on.
3 Tagalog for "street urchin".
Even if we spoke Tagalog at home, we still watched American movies and TV shows. Filipino media was produced heavily in English, too. If magazines and newspapers were to be taken seriously, they’d be written in English. When we watched Filipino serial dramas - known as teleserye - the characters spoke Taglish, which is Tagalog infused with English. Taglish was the natural way of conversation in my middle-class neighbourhood in southern Metro Manila.
I still struggle to form sentences without at least one English word in it. And on the rare occasions that I do, the words feel funny and incomplete in my mouth.
Unconsciously privileging English
I grew up in Manila. Filipino1 was a compulsory subject in all levels of education, but I didn’t care about doing well in it as much as I did with my other subjects - and I was amazing at school. I won (English) spelling competitions just about every year, yet I still don’t know the difference between the usage of ng and nang. When we had to write reading reports, I would put so much effort into writing my English one about the latest book I bought over the weekend, yet for my Filipino report, I’d write something half-assed about a short story we read in class.
It wasn’t like my school encouraged us to hold the Filipino language in high regard. After all, we had two separate subjects for English - Language Arts and Reading - and only one for Filipino. Essentially, we were getting eighty minutes of English language education a day and only forty minutes of Filipino. English is also the medium of instruction in all the other subjects.2 How’s that for priorities?
I used to hate speaking Tagalog. I wanted to be “English-speaking”, like some of the kids at my school. I didn’t want to sound like a batang kalye3 like my mother often teased whenever she heard me talking to my friends. Whenever we went to the US on holiday, I got on the plane praying I’d have gotten rid of the Tagalog in my system by the time I returned. Of course, that never happened.
Today, I am a proud Tagalog speaker. But I’ve realised that my bilingualism isn’t a dichotomy. It's a spectrum.
Code-switching
If anything, I know that language is fluid. Not just in a macro sense, as discussed in the thinkpieces written after the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is announced, but also in a micro sense, with the way we, as individuals, change the way we talk to different people over the course of a day.
The first time I heard this term was from my mother, after I marvelled at how a six-year-old boy switched from speaking to me in English to speaking to his brothers in Tagalog not even ten seconds later. As a linguistic term, code-switching was exactly what I just described. It’s someone moving from one language (or language variant or dialect) to another, usually in the same conversation. Taglish, by this definition, is a form of code-switching.
As both a colonial product and a part of the Filipino diaspora, my experience of code-switching can be best summed up by this NPR article by Gene Demby, in which he writes:
“...we're looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction.”
While I was thinking about writing this post, I found myself ruminating over how much I switch codes over the course of the day. Some mornings I wake up thinking in Tagalog, while other days I wake up thinking in English. I unconsciously move back and forth between Taglish and English while speaking to my family. The English I speak around them - and around our Filipino family friends - is largely Philippine English, particularly in terms of cadence and accent. When I’m talking to my younger Filipino friends, most of whom grew up in New Zealand, I shift to a slightly different code. Amongst ourselves, we have a tendency to speak Englog, which is English peppered with Tagalog expressions. In both situations, I talk a lot faster, a lot livelier.
However, it’s a different story outside the confines of the Filipino community. I’m a Politics student at university, and it’s a discipline that calls for plenty of class discussion. In situations like these, I assert myself as much as possible. My New Zealand English is cranked up to the most prestigious register that I could muster, and I’ve impressed - if not intimidated - many people with my command of their language. It’s something I’ve observed from my four years of high school debating, but white people never stop being surprised that a brown girl is schooling them in English.
Outside an academic or a formal setting, but still outside the Filipino community, I switch codes again. When I’m with friends who aren’t Filipino, I speak New Zealand English, but one that reflects the neighbourhood I live in. My “informal” New Zealand English not only has Filipino influences, but also Polynesian influences. My cadence is a lot more varied, slowing down and speeding up in between clauses.
The funny thing is, where I’m conscious of my code switching at home and my code switching at university, I actually never noticed that I spoke like this until I graduated from my West Auckland high school and met people who didn’t live there. Does that mean “West Auckland English” is my “default code”? Is a default code even a must-have?
Our use of language reflects who we are as people. Significantly, it also reflects how we navigate the different parts of our identities in our daily interactions. As a bilingual person who splits my time between Filipino and non-Fiilpino settings, code-switching reveals different facets of my personality. I can be the polite and charming granddaughter at a family gathering or I can be the fast-talking brown girl with the wry sense of humour among my uni friends.
The more we tap into our cultural identities, the more our codes change to accommodate it. Check out this One News feature from six years ago, where they discuss how a stronger sense of New Zealand identity has created a distinct variety of English.
Languages are fascinating. Most people who enjoyed studying languages in school can attest to that. They’re fluid. They have funny words and odd grammatical quirks. And at the bottom of it all, languages evolve because we do. They are the garments we continually alter to fit us a little better every time we change.
1 Filipino is the prestige register of Tagalog, which originated from the dialect of the highly educated upper middle class in Manila.
2 Except for civics/social studies, but that’s only taught in Filipino until Grade 6, then it’s English from then on.
3 Tagalog for "street urchin".
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