After the hoopla that was the arrogance of Christopher Lao, we have now James Soriano. A newspaper columnist in the Manila Bulletin, his article, "Language, learning, identity, privilege," has earned him the ire of the Filipino people. The Manila Bulletin has deleted his article in its online version, but luckily, some people were able to save it and the article is still circulated among Filipino netizens. The article is basically a reflection of how he, raised and schooled in English, found Filipino difficult, but that his surroundings forced him to learn it, lest he found himself misunderstanding his many nannies and drivers. Before the article ended though, he claimed that Filipino could be a "language of learning" and not the "language of the learned."
Before we judge this man though, here is his article.
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Language, learning, identity, privilege
By JAMES SORIANO
English is the language of learning. I’ve known this since before I could go to school. As a toddler, my first study materials were a set of flash cards that my mother used to teach me the English alphabet.
My mother made home conducive to learning English: all my storybooks and coloring books were in English, and so were the cartoons I watched and the music I listened to. She required me to speak English at home. She even hired tutors to help me learn to read and write in English.
In school I learned to think in English. We used English to learn about numbers, equations and variables. With it we learned about observation and inference, the moon and the stars, monsoons and photosynthesis. With it we learned about shapes and colors, about meter and rhythm. I learned about God in English, and I prayed to Him in English.
Filipino, on the other hand, was always the ‘other’ subject — almost a special subject like PE or Home Economics, except that it was graded the same way as Science, Math, Religion, and English. My classmates and I used to complain about Filipino all the time. Filipino was a chore, like washing the dishes; it was not the language of learning. It was the language we used to speak to the people who washed our dishes.
We used to think learning Filipino was important because it was practical: Filipino was the language of the world outside the classroom. It was the language of the streets: it was how you spoke to the tindera when you went to the tindahan, what you used to tell your katulong that you had an utos, and how you texted manong when you needed “sundo na.”
These skills were required to survive in the outside world, because we are forced to relate with the tinderas and the manongs and the katulongs of this world. If we wanted to communicate to these people — or otherwise avoid being mugged on the jeepney — we needed to learn Filipino.
That being said though, I was proud of my proficiency with the language. Filipino was the language I used to speak with my cousins and uncles and grandparents in the province, so I never had much trouble reciting.
It was the reading and writing that was tedious and difficult. I spoke Filipino, but only when I was in a different world like the streets or the province; it did not come naturally to me. English was more natural; I read, wrote and thought in English. And so, in much of the same way that I learned German later on, I learned Filipino in terms of English. In this way I survived Filipino in high school, albeit with too many sentences that had the preposition ‘ay.’
It was really only in university that I began to grasp Filipino in terms of language and not just dialect. Filipino was not merely a peculiar variety of language, derived and continuously borrowing from the English and Spanish alphabets; it was its own system, with its own grammar, semantics, sounds, even symbols.
But more significantly, it was its own way of reading, writing, and thinking. There are ideas and concepts unique to Filipino that can never be translated into another. Try translating bayanihan, tagay, kilig or diskarte.
Only recently have I begun to grasp Filipino as the language of identity: the language of emotion, experience, and even of learning. And with this comes the realization that I do, in fact, smell worse than a malansang isda. My own language is foreign to me: I speak, think, read and write primarily in English. To borrow the terminology of Fr. Bulatao, I am a split-level Filipino.
But perhaps this is not so bad in a society of rotten beef and stinking fish. For while Filipino may be the language of identity, it is the language of the streets. It might have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the language of the learned.
It is neither the language of the classroom and the laboratory, nor the language of the boardroom, the court room, or the operating room. It is not the language of privilege. I may be disconnected from my being Filipino, but with a tongue of privilege I will always have my connections.
So I have my education to thank for making English my mother language.
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James Soriano is a 21-year old student of Ateneo De Manila University and has been writing in the Manila Bulletin since 2008.
First time I read it, I was like, "That was just fucking arrogant!" Here we have a pure Filipino, born and raised and educated in the Philippines, and he dare belittle his own language? Some people say it's satire. Fuck satires, this is not. If he intended this really as a satire, then he did an epic failure, a monumental bastardization of the language and the fuckin' genre. Even I do not understand what he wanted to point out it in this essay. Was he thankful that English was his mother tongue? Does he feel remorse that he doesn't fully grasp Filipino? It seems to me that he doesn't feel any regret for not knowing Filipino. I cannot believe that he would choose not being able to know it since he was just living in a society of rotten beef and stinking fish. So what if Filipino is the language of the streets? It ought to be! By virtue that it is the language of the fucking country. He says that it is not the language of the learned, so what ought he to do? Intellectualize the language, so that it would be what he wanted it to be. He says that with English, he would always have his connections, and he would stop at that? His mind is fucking narrowed by his bourgeouis upbringing.
Learning English per se is not bad, but to deride Filipino in your own country is just plain distateful. He doesn't even look like a foreigner! He was implying that everybody who knows Filipino is a nanny or a driver. This basically shows how narrow his bourgeouis experiences are. I also do not understand his bragging of his learning of German, was it mentioned just to emphasize that he is educated? Apparently, the very article itself is a work of an uneducated, unrefined, arrogant elitist. Fuck. His way of thinking isn't even elite.
What a fucking way to end Buwan ng Wika (National Language Month).
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