Reflection paper

Reconstituting space: Exploring place lexicon in Philippine languages

I find the talk by Prof. Jesus Federico Fernandez very interesting. I may not be studying
languages but knowing the distribution of the Philippine language through time would help
us know more about the language we are using right now.
This is the first time that I am learning new things which is about languages. From this
webinar, one of the information that I learned is that there are 175 local languages in the
Philippines. I know that Philippines is not only a Tagalog-speaking country but the Filipino
people are also good in speaking English. And aside from learning the number of
languages spoken in the Philippines, extinction is also possible for languages. From this,
I then thought of languages as a living organism. A language should be actively used or
spoken for it to be considered alive. My main Filipino local language is Tagalog. I grew
up in Marinduque, a province in which the main dialect is Tagalog. When I set my foot in
Manila (which is around 200 km from the province of Marinduque), Tagalog is still the
dialect spoken in Manila, however there is something different about the Tagalog
language that citizens from the National Capital Region is using. First is the manner of
how Tagalog is spoken. And of course there are some vocabulary which are different
from that spoken in my province.When I was a kid, every time an individual who left
Marinduque to stay in NCR and then return to the province, there is always this Manileño
accent that is so different from the accent of Marinduqueño people. In my experience of speaking
with different tagalog-speaking people, I believe that the Tagalog from Batangas have similarities
with the Tagalog in Marinduque. The Batangueño accent is also near to the accent of the
Marinduqueño. For instance the usual words we use in our daily conversations such as the word,
nandito (here in English) would be nandiné in Batangas and Marinduque. The word pumunta ka
dito/ parito (come here in English) would be parine in Batangas and Marinduque. But there are
words in Marinduque that are unique from that of Tagalog words in other locations such as
Batangas. We have the words “bila-bila” which is “paru-paro” (butterfly in English) in the general
Tagalog. The “mantika” (cooking oil) we used to buy in sari-sari stores, we call it “langis” in
Marinduque. There was one time when I asked my cousin (who lived in Manila) to buy some
“langis” in the sari-sari store and came back with a diesel oil. Another word that can be misleading
to people who are not living in Marinduqe is the word “landi.” My grandmother used to scold me
when playing with stored waters in buckets. She usually utter the words, “Huwag mo landiin ang
tubig”. She means, “Do not play with the water”. To other people who would hear that phrase, they
would give the word “landi” to mean “to flirt” in English. Aside from the differences between the
Tagalog spoken in Batangas and to that in Marinduque, I have also compared the Tagalog versus
the Bisaya dialect and I conclude them to have some similar words but different meaning. For
example the word “ibon” (bird in English) in tagalog would actually mean ant in Bisaya.
Miscommunications might occur when using your original language in other locations or speaking
it to people from other locations. This just proves how the Philippine language (even for Tagalog)
has its differences in the different provinces/locations in the country. It is just amazing how diverse
and colorful the languages in the Philippines are.
In this webinar it was mentioned that the spread of the Filipino language in the Philippine
archipelago is due to the movement of people over time. Ancient people bring with them
their language when they move to new places. From the webinar, it was said that the
origins of the Philippine language may have come from the locations from East Africa to
the Islands of the Pacific. And I learned that the Philippine language belong to a family of
Austronesian language. Austronesia would refer to the places, Madagascar, Southeast
Asia (which would include Philippines), Micronesia, New Guinea, Melanesia, Polynesia
and Taiwan. Thus, these places would have similarities in language with the Tagalog
language. I agree with this especially in the country of Indonesia. One familiar word that
I usually here from the Indonesians is the word “Mahal” which would mean expensive, but
in Tagalog, it could mean “love” or “expensive”. I am not familiar with how languages are
classified but in the presentation of Prof. Fernandez it is showed that, like an organism,
languages also are classified or grouped into families. These languages must be diverse
to come up with a system that group or sort languages into families. Languages may be
intangible, but we can still make an analysis of it by knowing the places with people
speaking a specific language.
I didn’t know that Philippine languages could be so diverse. What is interesting here is
that throughout the Philippine Archipelago, words for example, dagat in the Central
Philippines is darat in Northern Philippines and ragat in Southern Philippines. The words
we speak varies in space. It is just amazing that in a map, we can determine the
distribution of how the same word varies from one dialect to another. Dagat in tagalog
would refer to any body of water which is salty and where fishermen would farm fishes.
The similarities in sound of the words dagat, darat and ragat, would give us a curious
question of “in which part of the Philippines did the original word for dagat, darat and ragat
started?” I think this would really be a question that is difficult to answer. By just imagining
how the words would transform from dagat to darat and to ragat is very intriguing and
would make you want to know the story of how it transformed through space and maybe
time is also a factor.
In modern times, I realized that preserving the original Filipino language is not possible.
Nowadays, Filipinos are more enticed with foreign products (Korean entertainment, anime
of the Japanese, telenovelas of the western countries etc.) and those products not only
endorse the products itself, but they also endorse their culture and language. I know I
also patronize those products; this is because their culture is so mesmerizing that you
want to learn how they speak and to know more about their place. I do believe that with
this kind of mentality, the Filipino language will keep on evolving through the incorporation
of other foreign languages in its vocabulary. But I also believe that this has little impact
on the Philippine language. Filipinos learning something or patronizing something foreign
from the original language would not really mean abandoning the mother language, it just
means Filipinos are flexible and are open to changes and developments.