Second class language?
By Antonio Java
Cebu Daily News First Posted 16:55:00 07/31/2007 Filed Under: Education, Culture (general)
I was reading a friend’s blog last week where she made quite an interesting point about the Visayan language: It is a language spoken by a great majority in the country, yet it has become relegated to a sort of second-class tongue.
I’ve stressed in previous columns that the Visayan language or Binisaya is, as languages go, more evolved than most major languages in existence, according to language scholars. The fact that Binisaya is a couple of hundred words larger than, say, Tagalog or English is proof enough of its age and flexibility (just the other day, my barkada was wracking our brains trying to translate the Visayan word “hata†to English. Finding no direct translation, the closest we got was “feint,†though we had to note that to feint is more of a movement meant to mislead or to deceive, while hata is a movement more related to indecisiveness rather than deception).
Some would argue that there is no such thing as a “superior†language. I’d actually tend to agree, since the idea of a language is to communicate ideas. Though one has to admit that certain languages make the transfer of ideas easier and faster than other languages. However, for the transfer of ideas to work, one particular language has to be common between two or more people. So, logically, if a language is spoken by more people, then more people can share ideas, and an idea can spread faster. Right.
Well then, here’s the premise in the Philippines: Tagalog is taught in school. English is taught in school. But when it comes to sheer population, there are more natural Visayan speakers in the country than there are natural Tagalog speakers or English speakers.
So then why, oh why, isn’t Visayan – one of the most beautiful, most evolved, most ancient, and most widely spoken languages in the Philippines – NOT taught in school?
In fact, over the past few decades, Visayan has, unfortunately, been given a stigma or sorts as something inferior. Even some of us Visayan natives refer to something as “Bisaya kaayo†to derogate something. In fact, in many schools, speaking Visayan is practically banned, sometimes with a fine imposed on every instance a student speaks Binisaya.
Can someone please tell me when Binisaya or being Bisaya became something so “wrong†that we have to be fined for it?
It would be easy to blame “imperialist Manila†for the state of Visayan today. Tagalog is spoken in the capital city of Manila, hence, the capital city’s language should be the language of the entire country. I could also easily blame the influences of those who sought to colonize us: The Spanish and the Americans. In attempting to establish a colony here, they had to impose their own culture and language on the natives. No doubt, these things are partly to blame.
But I also blame the Visayans themselves, among whose number I am included, for slipping over the past few decades. I would hardly say that we Visayans were quick to abandon our own in lieu of something new and foreign. If that were so, Binisaya would have been lost to history generations ago. But neither have I seen any major effort for us to retain and educate ourselves of our own native culture. Not Asian culture, not Filipino culture, but Visayan culture.
Now I’m not saying we all start tattooing ourselves and make like our Pintados ancestors; for a culture to survive, it must also evolve. But at the very least, we should teach ourselves our own history, and we should especially teach ourselves our own language. But in this aspect, we are slipping. We’re slipping so much, in fact, that Cebuano, a dialect of the Visayan language, is already so full of words from other languages that while native Cebuano speakers can still understand pure Binisaya, most Cebuanos can’t speak Binisaya fluently.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should stop teaching English in school. English is already the widely accepted “global†language and without it, we miss out on the world. I’m not even saying we stop teaching Tagalog (or what some would like to call “Filipino,†though any Filipino worth his tongue knows that the Filipino language is just what they call Tagalog in an attempt to make it more nationally appealing… emphasis on “attemptâ€).
What I’m saying is that we Bisayas should not leave out our own native tongue when it comes to the languages we teach our children in school. I’m not merely proposing to allow, or even standardize the use of Bisaya as a language of instruction wherever Bisaya is natively spoken. I say we should have Bisaya classes, where students are TAUGHT proper Binisaya in all its native glory. It’s the most widely used language in the country. WHY NOT?!
And by extension, along with teaching ourselves the proper way to SPEAK Binisaya, perhaps we should even teach ourselves the proper way to WRITE Binisaya. That’s right: Alibata classes, which is applicable to both Binisaya and Tagalog. From my meager experience with Alibata (or Baybayin as it was called in olden times), I’ve discovered that one is actually able to preserve intonations and stress points in the written words through visual representations where it would otherwise be lost if Bisaya words were written in the Roman alphabet (compensated only by a reader’s actual knowledge in Binisaya).
But as it is, no schools I know of teach Binisaya. And I suspect only the most specialized of libraries have literature that teaches a person Alibata.
Well, here’s a factoid for you all: UNESCO estimates that half of the world’s languages are endangered because they are no longer taught or spoken.
When was the last time anyone remembers having Bisaya classes?
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