Anglicization of the Philippine languages

I know this issue has been discussed many times over, yet I still find it fresh and is worth composing. Here goes: the contemporary culture of the Philippines is very much affected with the American colonization more than the Spanish. Americans were here only since 1898 whereas the Spaniards were here since 1521. With that, Filipinos came to be called “little brown Americans”. With the phrase came the imposition of English throughout the archipelago and we even have our own Philippine English.

We all know how English (or how American) we are. Look at our street and store signs: 99% are in English. Everywhere we go, English is alive. From the songs we fondly sing in our videokes to the blogs we post. The major factor in the development of English is of course it's taught in schools at all levels and is by far the medium of instruction and technology is fueling its popularity. Since there are lots of situations where English rules, I’ll point where in the Filipino life English is not used. Today, the local languages even in these areas are hemorrhaging, gasping for its existence --the spoken vernaculars are peppered liberally with English words making them Taglish, Bislish, etc:

• Speaking/socializing. We use the regional languages (Tagalog, Bisaya, Ilocano, etc). This situation now creates a broken language e.g. Taglish and Bislish among the Pinoy educated elite. Examples: (Tagalog) Fluent me mag-English. (Bisaya) Gi-cramps akong feet. This phenomenon happens also with other regional languages. I just don’t know what will happen to the spoken languages in the country, 50 to 100 years from now. But I pray that the regional languages will still be spoken. As what happens to Spanish in Zamboanga or the French in Haiti, I suspect that a creole language will ultimately rise. We will have lots of varieties of it in the country then, since we have seven major languages. Imagine these seven mutating into an English creole.

• Mass media (>50% Tagalog). Yes it’s around that because broadcast media is broken down into TV broadcast (Tagalog majority), AM broadcast (Tagalog), FM broadcast (English). Local cinema is also in Tagalog. However, the print media (newspapers, magazines) is by far circulated in English.

• Schools, churches, the government and commerce. This is quite tricky since it’s given that printed/written texts are exclusively in English in these institutions, but the vernacular prevails in the speaking arena. In schools for example, even for English classes, the teachers switch to the vernacular when teaching i.e. in explaining the concepts. The churches (Roman Catholic for example) have their service in English or the vernacular. The government does its activities primarily in English, but in the vernacular most often in informal and relaxed situations. The situation in the government is more or less the same with commerce and business. Almost all firms in the country speak the vernacular in their day-to-day activities.

That’s all I can say to the status of our local languages. Give it another 50 years and I'm afraid we will find that speaking in the vernacular as it was, is funny. English is so intertwined with our daily lives.