Late last year I wrote a post here about the proposal of reintroducing the teaching of Spanish in the school system of the Philippines.
My post has generated many responses. It has been in fact the most popular of my post since I started this blog. Since the time I wrote it I’ve found out some other facts relating to the history and nature of the Spanish language presence in the Philippines.
- During the colonial period (over three centuries) Spanish was the language used for administrative purposes, however, there was never a massive immigration of Spanish colonists as the Philippines didn’t have the economic potential of Mexico or Peru.
- The preaching of the gospels and the overall propagation of Christianity was mostly carried out via the native languages.
- Spain as colonial master only made the teaching of Spanish compulsory quite late in the 18th century.
Based on Ostler (2005:377 – 379)
Point 1 translates into a situation where a language doesn’t need to be used or maintained and consequently naturally reproduced by new generations of native speakers. The lack of enough native Spanish colonists didn’t provide the necessary environment for Spanish to have an initial firm hold at a greater scale during the period of the Spanish domination of this country. Ostler (2005) also lists the case of Dutch, as a colonial language with similarities to the fate of Spanish in the Philippines’ context. (p 395-403)
Apart from the primary role of the family for the maintenance of a language and the role played by a same language group setting to achieve this same goal, a language is propagated by organised school systems. Spain’s late response to the need to teach the general population Spanish together with the effects caused by the other two factors listed above may be assigned as the main reasons for Spanish not to have taken firm roots in the Philippines.
Bibliography
Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the Word (Harper Perennial, 2005)
i beg to disagree on your analysis of point 1. let’s just take the idea of economic factor as a hindrance to the immigration of Spaniards in the Philippines at its face value.
second, i also don’t agree with Ostler comparing the fate of the Spanish and Dutch languages. for the information of everybody, about 50 of the 87 languages and dialects in the Philippines are influenced by the Spanish language. the highly influenced one is the ‘chabacano’ in the southern part of the archipelago which is internationally known as ‘kitchen spanish’ being a grammatically wrong spanish language. similarly, a large percentage of the vocabulary of the ‘bikol’ language has roots in the spanish tongue.
thus, there are linguists who blame the spaniards for the death of the indigenous languages in the philippines.
with regards the re-introduction of the spanish language in the philippine educational system, well, it could be because of the following: 1. the past laws of the Philippines, including jurisprudence, are written in spanish. and these are still being used in the current legal system. 2. considering that a large percentage of the existing languages in the archipelago are influenced by the spanish language, it might as well be proper that the filipinos also learn the original language and not the ‘kitchen tongue’. 3. the philippines and spain shared a lot of historical and cultural experiences and now they are reviving them once again.
hope this clarifies the issues. thanks and keep blogging
