According to www.ethnologue.org, which has an accurate and more or less updated catalogue of the human languages, the Philippines has 171 live languages. I am saying languages, not dialects. Including dialects, we have even more. As the eminent linguist Max Weinrich said: "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy", meaning clearly, that a dialect is a language without political support. From this 171 languages, 61 have already less than 10000 speakers, 30 being spoken by the Aeta, Ita, Agta or Negritos -and it is not a coincidence that the most discriminated indigenous people in our archipelago have the most threatened languages, since a long history of abuses has reduced them to indigency, semislavery and even alcoholism, as reported Danilo B. Galang in Among the Agta of North Sierra Madre (Anvil, 2006) and other scholars. Summarizing, what I want say is, unless we do something about it, in less than 100 years we are going to lose at least, being optimistic, 50% of the languages that are currently spoken in the Philippines, which would be a cultural catastrophe, losing a huge part of the rich heritage which make us distinct and original. Globalization tends to uniformity and language is a useful tool. The consequence is that parents are refusing to talk to their children using their ancestral language. So should we care about that? Well, a person asking such a question is probably claiming the naive idea that "sharing a single language is a guarantor of mutual understanding and peace, a world new of alliances and global solidarity" (27). Examples showing just the opposite thing in the history are thousands. Here are eight reasons why we should start taking care of our linguistic heritage: 1. "There is not such a thing as a primitive language: every language is capable of great beauty and power of expression" (30). Many people should know this before saying anything about languages. In the same way, there is no connection between the complexity of the language and the intelligence of the speakers or of the culture: both are language myths. 2. "From the point of view of the 'human capital theory', language is a part of the resources people can draw upon in order to increase the value of their potential contribution to productivity" (31). Then, investing money in that is not exactly wasting it. 3. "They promote community cohesion and vitality, foster pride in a culture and give a a sense of self-confidence to a community" (31). It is a shame that there are Filipinos overseas who refuse to talk to me and to other Filipinos in our local language, as if they have forgotten the language they grew up with, believing that English is cool and is a superior language. My local languages are a source of pride. English should be reserved for situations in which we do not share the same language. 4. "The preservation of linguistic diversity is essential, for language lies at the heart of what it means to be human" (31-32). 5. "When language transmission breaks down, through language death, there is a serious loss of inherited knowledge" (32). We cannot access anymore the source of our history because they are written in Spanish and, probably, we are the only country in the world which has to read the national novel through translations. The consequence is clear: we do not know anything about our Prehispanic or Spanish Colonial Period, only misconceptions and established prejudices, as we can learn through the astonishing works of Fernando Zialcita and Nick Joaquin, two brilliant brains. Moreover, the situation is worst in the case of languages without written tradition. We can learn Spanish if we feel like and want to access a vast collection of literature. However, most of those endangered Filipino languages have not been written ever: once the last speaker dies, there will not be a come back. 6. "Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius (Krauss); each language constitutes a certain model of the universe, a semiotic of understanding of the world (V. Ivanov)" (36) Or expressed more poetically: "Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined" (O. Wendell Holmes) (37). I feel lucky of being polyglot: speaking different languages clearly increases our knowledge of the world. Each language is, in fact, another view of the world. "Each language reflects a unique encapsulation and interpretation of human existence" (44). 7. "As each language dies, another precious source of data -for philosophers, scientist, anthropologists, folklorists, historians, psychologists, linguists, writers,- is lost" (53). 8. "Languages are interesting in themselves" (54). Unlike the Mangyan poetry ambahan which is engraved in bamboo tubes using their ancient script surot, the literary traditions of most indigenous groups are oral in form, meaning the death of their spoken language is also the death of its literature if not preserved and documented. (Photo credit: http://www.jacobimages.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/mangyan_1939_1901.jpg) Unfortunately, almost nothing is being made to save this rich heritage in the Philippines. In many cases, an active program of language revitalization would provide new life to many languages. In another cases, the only thing we can do is to send an ethnolinguist capable of making a work of documentation and recording with the last few speakers before the language vanishes forever.
It has even been reported by several scholars while doing fieldwork that there is a tendency among Filipinos to avoid belonging to a certain local community, as if being a source of shame or discrimination. In my opinion, the rarest the language a person speaks, the uniquest it is, and this is the way everybody should look at languages. While in the European Union, Taiwan or Australia, many steps have been made in order to preserve their respective language heritage, the Philippines, being one of the richest countries in terms of human biodiversity, does not even have a very museum of ethnology where urban Filipinos could learn about the many cultures inhabiting our archipelago. Unluckily, protection or documentation (production of grammars and dictionaries, especially) of threatened languages does not seem to be among the important tasks of our Linguistic Society of the Philippines, as you can read in the link. We cannot expect our government to develop policies to encourage the maintenance of our precious linguistic heritage, since they see -wrongly- heterogeneity as a danger for the unity of the country, when it is just the opposite: heterogeneity, since the very foundation of this country, is the nucleus of our real and prismatic identity. Therefore, keeping alive this non-tangible, cultural and intellectual heritage only depends on us. -Gyrovago This article was originally posted in Critical Thinking Manila (www.lailustrada.blogspot.com).
0 Comments
|
About the AuthorThoughts on politics, economy, education, development and policy while stuck on traffic and what not. Archives
August 2015
Categories |