The Language Question in The Philippines

San Juan/Philippines
GLOBAL ENGLISH VERSUS FILIPINO; or
“SNEAKING INTO THE PHILIPPINES,” BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON: An

Intervention into the Language Question
by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Fellow, Harry Ransom Center,University of Texas, Austin
It is not my thinking that language constitutes differences. There is an access via

language to difference in knowledge…but language doesn’t constitute the ontological
differences, not at all…. “Idealinguistery,” linguistic idealism,…consists in thinking
that language constitutes differences. From my point of view this is to fuse [mistakenly]
knowledge and truth.
---ALAIN BADIOU, Infinite Thought
I. “English” in the Globalized Capitalist System
In one of the more controversial books published at the end of the last century, The Accidental
Asian by Eric Liu, whose father moved from China to Taiwan and eventually to the United
States, the accident of being Chinese by descent becomes an asset in forging a more genuine
American identity. This identity is necessarily a product of cross-breeding, a geopolitical mix
corresponding to an era of mobile capital, fluid investments, and flexible citizenship. Liu quotes
favorably Arjun Appadurai’s vision of the U.S. as an ethnoracial “free-zone” populated by
myriad diasporic communities with plural loyalties. Ultimately, however, Liu settles for
assimilation into what he calls an “exceptional” nation “because it synthesizes the many cultures
it welcomes. Far more than in Bourne’s time, America now is indeed a transnationality: an
amalgamation, a seedbed for once unthinkable hybrids. It is precisely in an age of globalization
that America becomes the most necessary place on earth. That is why we owe it our undivided
San Juan: On the Language Question 2
loyalty” (1998, 128). An extraordinary profession of allegiance, indeed, amid avowals of fidelity
to ethnic filiation.
At the same time, Liu is proud (as he memorializes his extended family) of his Chinese
cultural heritage expressed in what may be called Americanese idiom and sensibility. His
moralizing stance seems a provocative challenge, if not a conundrum: in a time witnessed by the
fall of “Berlin” walls and erosion of borders, Liu calls for a stringent patriotism that anticipates
the post-9/11 Manichean fixation of the U.S. Patriot Act on a beleaguered “homeland.”
We encounter a crux for diagnosis and hermeneutic suspicion. What are we to make of this
symptomatic case of the Asian/Chinese American author claiming to express himself in two
discourses but in fact only translates one subtext into the official text? Is English the proper
language that in its claim to neutrality and hegemony can legitimately ventriloquize other
languages and their associated experiences? What is the unspoken dialectic between English as a
hegemonic language and the process of localizing the cosmopolitan agenda of globalization?
Globalizing Blues
As everyone knows, “globalization” has become the ubiquitous “buzz word” in the North
American academy today as well as in international business circles. But how are teachers of
English implicated in this suspicious totalizing word? Since practically everyone will have his or
her version of this phenomenon, allow me to present my own that will serve as the framework
for my comments on the significance of English as a “global” language and its geopolitical
resonance. To understand “globalization” better, our ingrained notion of distinctive realms of
discourse—culture, politics, ideology, economics—should be suspended for now since reality is
of course much more complex and dynamic, eluding the reifying tentacles of our conceptual
apparatus.
First, a general definition. I take the term “globalization” as a euphemism for the almost
uncontrolled expansion and domination of the world economy (particularly of the
underdeveloped countries of the “periphery”) by a few transnational corporations based in
Europe, Japan, and North America. This is a continuation and acceleration of a systemic process
known as the worldwide spread of capitalism (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001). Key to this process
of control are institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank (WB), and
International Monetary Fund (IMF). Some implications of “globalization” (the adjectival form is
more contagious) are: the interdependence of economies and nations, the virtual abolition or
neutralization of boundaries between nation-states, liberalization of markets, greater permeability
of civil society and state, and integration at all levels. Social scientists like Immanuel
Wallerstein, Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, Roland Robertson, and others have stressed such
features as the role of the world economic system in the modernization of “peripheral” societies,
and the nature of modernity as the conversion of the world into a single market for capital, labor,
and commodities. There are also radical implications in the reconfiguration of subjectivity or
identity, ecology, the “Other” as different, and the hegeterogeneity of local narratives, and so on.
With the recent breakthroughs in electronic telecommunication and transport, the time/space
divide has been reconfigured into postmodernity. We are now re-settled into a global village
once envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in the sixties: globalization actualizes “the intensification
of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are
shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens 1990:64). Not only is the
sneeze in Wall Street heard by rubber-workers in Malaysia who are subsequently fired from their
jobs, but that and other visceral noises from the executive sessions of the IMF/WB register their
impact on the Nike workers in Indonesia or the maquiladoras in the borderland between Mexico
and the United States.
One current doxa is that with the rapid changes in communication technology, the
informatization of quotidian life, most if not all societies have undergone a revolution of sorts.
There are only surfaces, no more depth or interiority (as in the characters of Proust or
Dostoevsky). This rupture with modernity spells the dissolution of the wall between culture and
economy; not only are economic and cultural spheres interdependent or reciprocally tied
together, there is a subtle elision between them such that cultural forms (from films to television,
performances, literary discourses of all kinds, pedagogy, conversations, political organizations,
etc.) have become commodities, and commodities in turn have become symbols or signs—even,
for Baudrillard, simulacra and simulations. In short, while humanities scholars still give token
recognition to goods as narrowly conceived material objects being exchanged, for those with a
postmodernist optic, the significant point is the acts of exchange and circulation of symbolic
goods. In this category we now include fast foods, t-shirts, advertisements, music, and other
items encompassed by what is called TRIPS (trade-related intellectual property rights). In this
intercultural export-import of cultural artifacts, we find the central figure of the anthropologist as
traveler who finds himself in “concrete mediation” and “historical tension” (Clifford 1992, 101)
with the native relocalized or dislocated into the borderland. As we will see, the migrant worker
parodies this trope of travel in an ironic and counter-intuitive manner.
Certain urgent questions press us when, in antithesis to a putative economism of mainstream
globalization experts, adversaries perform their own reductionist game. They posit a culturalism
that reduces everything to discourse, texts, and semiotic play of differential counters, while
giving only token or gestural recognition to labor, market, and actual commodities being
produced and consumed. This exorbitance of the signifier becomes equivalent to globalization
tout court. One way we can grasp the limitation of this view is by translating it into the field of
English—the concept of “field” is construed here in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense as a structured space
of social positions of groups or individuals in which the positions and interrelations, usually in
conflict, are determined by the distribution of various kinds of resources or capital (Thompson
1991)—in which diverse speakers/writers map their own locations and orientations.
In his 1997 book English as a Global Language, David Crystal argued persuasively for
treating English (whose privileged model is of course British English) as already a confirmed
global language, an international “lingua franca.” Crystal is neither naïve nor chauvinist; he also
warns against the dangers of a global language. Nonetheless, Crystal frankly states that English
has become a “world language” owing to the economic and political power of the English-
speaking world, in particular their “military power” (1997, 7). The reference, of course, is to
British imperial might in the past and the hegemonic power of the United States in the present.
Let us recall also Winston Churchill’s cultural empire of the “English-speaking peoples,”
otherwise known also as “The New English Empire.” Especially after Sepember 11, 2001, the
voice of God speaks now not only in the rhetoric of the King James’s Bible, but more
unilaterally in the official sound-bytes of White House/Pentagon briefings.
The Numbers Game
In terms of numbers, English speakers today comprise only less than those who consider
Chinese as their mother tongue: 372 million versus 1,113 million. And though it is the world’s
second most common native tongue, English will soon be overtaken by the South Asian
linguistic group whose leading members are Hindi and Urdu (Walraff 2000, 7). This trend will
continue, even though today India is regarded as having the fourth largest population of English
speakers after the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria (the Philippines is sometimes
cited as the third). This fact supports Crystal’s own contention that it is not demography but
political, economic, and military power that determines globality. If China or India emerges in
the future as the world’s hegemonic center, then English would lose its global status.
Crystal has eloquently presented the case for the cultural and historic rights of English to be a
global language, even though ultimately such rights can only be enforced through political and
military means. Might trumps right? Barbara Walraff reports about a Western technology expert
who, in a conference in Taipei, witnessed the Chinese participants “grumbling about having to
use English to take advantage of the Internet’s riches.” Indeed, to defend its postmodern
ascendancy, English has to engage its rivals in the virtual realm of cyber-space, in the spectral
domain of finance capitalism. We are all beholden to the sovereignty of the spectacle, the
hypertext, the power of images and representations without any originals.
Before settling accounts and forecasting the future of “world English” or “englisches,” let
me cite some well-known respondents to its “civilizing” role. “Civilizing” is of course a
contentious word, perilously evocative of genocides and holocausts. What has language got to do
with colonizing armies or merchants? Language, for some experts, is a neutral instrument that
can be used by anyone. This belief echoes Stalin’s famous dictum that language is a working tool
that can be utilized by different social systems, a secondary signalling system within the
Pavlovian theory of reflexes (Radics and Kelemen 1983, 283). We are today far removed from
these simplifications.
However, the utilitarian view resonates with those who still believe in Saussure’s dichotomy
between langue and parole, or Chomsky’s distinction between “competence” and performance
(Chomsky 1978). What is the relation between the two? This is still an ongoing topic of debate
and empirical inquiry. We don’t need to subscribe to the questionable Whorf/Sapir thesis that
language ineluctably shapes reality to understand that the “field” of English for both teachers and
learners, with all its virtues and liabilities, cannot be divorced from its genealogy, its history, its
embeddedness in ongoing social conflicts (as evidenced in bloody fights over language in India
and elsewhere). Language cannot be separated from practices, from the unpredictable problems
of communication not just among individual speakers but also among communities, peoples,
nations. Aside from the usage-orientation of language stressed by Wittgenstein and Austin, we
need to make use of the concepts of “speech genres” and “utterance” proposed by Mikhail
Bakhtin and V. Voloshinov. Voloshinov’s conception of language as communication is captured
in this passage from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language:
Orientation of the word toward the addressee has an extremely high significance. In
point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and
for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship
between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses
the “one” in relation to the “other.” I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of
view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is
a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me,
then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser
and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor (1986, 86).
We will see shortly how this is dramatized in actual scenarios in Taiwan, particularly
between Filipina workers and their employers. The sign or word, in short language, is thus a
crucial arena of struggle between individuals and groups, the crucible for acquiring legitimacy
and insuring hegemony.
A historical background to the supremacy of American English is appropriate here. Just like
Latin and Spanish in previous centuries, English was a colonizing language for the British in
Africa, Asia and the Caribbean; it was the language of the English settlers in Virginia and New
England, as well as the language that presided over the defeat of the Mexicans in the Mexican-
American War of 1847-1848, after which 80,000 Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the territory
that is now the southwestern part of the United States found themselves under the geopolitical
sovereignty of English. It is this supremacy over Spanish-speaking bodies that marked the
reconstitution of the United States as a English-speaking nation: “The linguistic community
inherited from the Anglo-Saxon ‘mother country’ did not pose a problem [for the early
settlers]—at least apparently—until Hispanic immigration conferred upon it the significance of
class symbol and racial feature” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 104). The act of addressing the
conquered Mexicans here is part of a process of subjugation and disciplinarization, with

language as the prime ideological-political machinery for shaping the colonial subject.
Laws in English, rituals of government and business practices conducted in English,
interpellated the Mexican as subaltern subject. Resistance was there from the start. Testimonies
of the result of this mode of address range from Gandhi’s denunciation of English-ification (if I
may use this barbarism) as enslavement, to Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s eloquent attack on the
imposition of English as the unconscionable enforcement of the “culture of imperialism” (quoted
in Bailey 1990, 88). As a vehicle of beliefs, values, and world-paradigms, English was in effect a
weapon in the “civilizing mission” of the British and American imperial powers. To be sure,
some of the victims made use of the language skills they learned to survive, resist and finally free
themselves—to the extent that you can be free within the cultural and ideological domain
indexed by English.
Instead of presenting an inventory of further grievances, let me cite here the case of the
Philippines (where I was born), the only Southeast Asian direct colony of the U.S. for half a
century, and still virtually a neocolony.
The Philippine Example
My contacts here in Taiwan have conveyed to me the continuing relevance of the Philippines
to its political economy and sense of its own comparative difference. But I am not sure everyone
here appreciates fully the historical predicament of the Filipinos in improving their society.
According to Tom McArthur, author of the impressive source-book The Oxford Guide to World
English just published last year, the Philippines experienced an almost painless transition from
the feudal-dependent to the modern-independent stage of national existence. From the
domination of monarchical Catholic Spain from 1521 and subsequently of the “republican,
paternalistic and quasi-imperial United States from 1898,” English spread rapidly in the
Philippines because “it was the new language of government, preferment, and education” with
such incentives as “recruitment into the civil service, opportunities to study in—and migrate
to—the US; and the use of English for business beyond the islands” (2002, 344). The impression
given is that it was all sweetness and light. What McArthur skipped in his sanitized capsule
history is the violent subjugation of about ten million Filipinos (1.4 million were killed in the
U.S. war of pacification from 1899 to 1914) whose revolutionary leaders communicated to the
masses in the vernacular while using Spanish as the intellectual and political medium for
expressing their republic ideals and democratic principles. The imposition of American English
was not a charitable afterthought: the U.S. military administration decreed in the midst of the
military campaigns that English was a necessary weapon in the subjugation of the natives. As
General Arthur McArthur observed in 1900: the educational system, employing American
volunteer teachers of English, was “an adjunct to military operations, calculated to pacify the
people and to procure and expedite the restoration of tranquillity throughout the archipelago”
(Atkinson 1905, 382).
English was politicized from the beginning. The official sanction for the deployment of
English as part of military logistics was given by the first civil governor of the colony, William
Howard Taft: : “English is the language of free government; it is the language through which
Filipinos can read the history of the hammering out by our ancestors of the heritage of liberty
which they have conferred upon us” (quoted in Bresnahan 1979, 65). Instead of the church as the
governmental agent, the mode of U.S. domination (supplementing overt coercion) used the
educational apparatus and the bureaucracy as the means of instilling in the colonial subject what
Bourdieu calls habitus, that is, “systems of durable dispositions” that generate “practices and
representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the
product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goal without presupposing the
conscious orientation towards ends and the express mastery of the operations necessary to attain
them” (Thompson 1984, 53). Physical violence was thus replaced by symbolic violence, with
popular consent given by recognition (more precisely, mis-recognition) without knowledge.
Anglo-Saxon “Manifest Destiny” addressed the colonized subalterns in English, its tutelage for
another century advanced through teachers of the language who replaced the Spanish friars as the
local administrators, moral authorities, and policemen in remote towns and villages.
We cannot fully appreciate the incalculable role that English teaching (as pedagogical and
ideological strategy of governance) performed in Americanizing the “natives” if we do not grasp
the durable and tenacious resistance of the majority of Filipinos to the repressive violence of
U.S. imperialism from 1899 to the inauguration of the Commonwealth in 1935 (San Juan 1998).
Teachers of English accompanied American soldiers shooting Filipino guerillas in villages
throughout the archipelago. In a sense, English was a civilizing machine fresh from its genocidal
adventures against the aboriginal Indians and subsequently revitalized by the lynching mindset of
white racial supremacists at the end of the Reconstruction. The historian Renato Constantino
summed up this aspect of U.S. occupation in the first three decades of the century which
produced an Americanized elite of local bureaucrats and compradors armed with the prestige and
efficacy of American English:
Spanish colonialism Westernized the Filipino principally through religion. American

colonialism superimposed its own brand of Westernization initially through the
imposition of English and the American school system which opened the way for other
Westernizing agencies.
The result was the utilization of education as a weapon of pacification and for the
transmission of colonial ideals that transformed the people into naively willing victims
of American control. The use of English as a medium of instruction has been the
principal cause of backwardness among the products of the system. Far from being a
medium of communication and instruction, for the overwhelming majority it
constitutes a barrier to all but rote learning….
Moreover, the neglected native languages have suffered from underdevelopment and
this in turn has retarded the intellectual life of the people. But of course, this situation
has not prevented Americanization; rather, it has made the Filipino mind most receptive
to the more banal aspects of American culture as transmitted through films, TV and
popular reading matter. Such “cultural” fare in turn transmits those consumer tastes and
attitudes that U.S. corporations find it most profitable to implant (1978, 218-19)
The habitus of the Filipino speaker of English persists, reinforced by institutional sanctions
both economic and political. The capacity to speak an English “of sorts” seems to be a “mixed
blessing,” as some allege, because it affords Filipinos “maneuverability in international
economics, diplomacy and scholarship” (Bresnahan 1979, 70). I doubt if it was a blessing at all
since the majority of Filipinos do not really have adequate competence in transacting business in
English, or engaging intellectually in that language, despite the saturation of the whole country
with American cultural products and mass-mediated commodities.
The situation today is transitional if not muddled and uncertain. Despite the parity accorded
to Filipino as one of the official languages, and the implementation of a bilingual education (now
reversed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the pursuit of globalizing society by
recolonizing citizens under IMF/WB/WTO aegis), English remains the language of opportunity
and aspiration. This not so much because it “offers access to a world literary tradition and
protects against insularity,” as McArthur (2002, 348) alleges, but because it endows Filipino
Overseas Workers (OFW) headed for Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe and the Middle
East with an edge, a selling point, over their competitors from Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, and so
on. These migrant contract laborers were hailed by former President Corazon Aquino as “the
new heroes” (“mga bagong bayani) because their enormous remittance enables the government
to pay its foreign debt. It is in this moment of globalization that even Filipino English, with its
peculiar variation from the standard norm, despite its hybridized and indigenized character,
becomes commodified and begins to engage in precarious games of power and identity politics.
It is here where English becomes instrumentalized without losing its own normative singularity.
The field of English is once more traversed by historical forces with both repressive and
emancipatory potential depending on the conjuncture of the social formations where the
language is lived, acted out, or embodied by flesh-and-blood speakers and writers.
Give and Take, More or Less
Earlier I said that to understand fully the field of language, we need to move beyond the
formalistic linguistics of Chomsky, beyond the binary dualism of competence/performance, to a
perspective of viewing language as speech-acts or utterances. True, language is a system of
equivalences—signs bear constant meanings or referents such as those archived in dictionaries: I
mean what I say when I say “serious,” not “sensuous.” But over and above these conventional
patterns normalized by rules agreed to by everyone, we have the import of the words and their
use-values, which is altogether another matter entirely. We do not just exchange words as
counters of equivalent value because the exchange occurs between addresser and addressee who
occupy different places in the social hierarchy, with their own cultures--collective histories,
memories, and perspectives of the future. The Italian philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi
elaborates on the analogy between linguistic exchange and the market:
For a situation of exchange to come about, we must have commodities as bearers, first
and foremost, of use-values. Without use-values, there would be no exchange-values.
Thus we immediately have a system of differences: the differences between the
invididual use-values and their respective exchange-values. The use-values,
furthermore, are themselves founded on differences: the needs and the ways to satisfy
such needs, to which use-values refer, are all eminently different, as are the working
processes from which use-values result and the properties that they bear. When use-
values come to constitute a system, it is therefore a system of differences; but for this
very reason, it is also a system of equivalences (1983, 113).
What is instructive to bear in mind here is that the dialectic of equivalence and difference needs
to be articulated with the similarity of individuals as abstract human beings irrespective of place
and time, and their difference as citizen subjects identified with specific histories and locations,
belonging to different collectivities and cultures. Linguistic exchange in English, or any language
for that matter, embodies this complex dialectic of equivalence and difference. To prove this
point, read Amy Tan’s story, “The Language of Discretion” (1990), which demonstrates that
Chinese communicates through the interplay of use-values and exchange-values, body language,
and a whole array of signs/signifying acts that Charles Sanders Peirce first explored in his
inaugural studies in semiotics.
Everyone here involved in the teaching of English appreciates the importance of accent,
vocality, and syntax as matters that reflect different positions of speakers and listeners in the
social hierarchy. Voloshinov and Bourdieu, among others, have emphasized the social
stratification of speech, the contextualized use of language as a central medium in the
reproduction of asymmetrically structured social formations. In effect the enabling condition of
meaningful speech acts or practices is found in the sociohistorical forms of life in which the
interlocutors are situated. I want to illustrate this last point with some examples taken from a
case study of Filipina domestics and their complicated imbrication in the dynamic if tortuous
unfolding of globalization here in the concrete social formation of Taiwan.
The sociologist Pei-Chia Lan of National Taiwan University has analyzed in detail the
transnational encounters between Filipina domestics and Taiwanese employers as a
conterpointing of two resources, two kinds of symbolic capitals. This is summed up in a Filipina
worker’s response to the perception of the inequality of status: “They [Taiwanese employers]
have more money but I speak better English” (Lan 2003, 133). What is the meaning of this
utterance presented to the investigator?
We need to frame the position of the interlocutors within the geopolitical map of recent
developments. Since the seventies, while the Philippine economy severely declined and
stagnated, Taiwan rose to become one of the prosperous Newly Industrializing Countries: in
2001, Taiwan’s GDP was $363.4 billion and GDP per head was $16,300 while the Philippines’s
GDP totalled only $78.4 billion and GDP per head was $979 (The Economist Group 2000, 104-
04). The disparity is sharply epitomized by this and other statistics. With a population of 80
million, more than half of whom are impoverished, the Philippine government under the Marcos
dictatorship started an official policy of exporting “warm bodies”—overseas contract
workers—to relieve unemployment and social unrest; Taiwan became the fourth major
destination for about 10 million OFWs after Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and Japan. On the
average Filipino workers in Taiwan receive the monthly wage of $15,840 (New Taiwanese
dollar; about US $460); this minimum wage equals three times what a secretary would get in the
Philippines, two times that of a school teacher. No wonder thousands of college-educated
Filipinas equipped with varying degrees of English proficiency find themselves with no
choice—if they are supporting an extended family—but to submit to a form of “modern slavery”
(Anderson 2000) concealed behind contracts and wages.
With the ascendancy of the United States as an Asian power in the Pacific Rim after World
War II, and the Taiwanese government’s dependency on U.S. military and diplomatic support
since 1949, American English as the global lingua franca has become indispensable for
Taiwan’s survival--as it has been for the Philippines for a much longer period. In fact English
has become required human capital with the growth of the export-oriented economy, the influx
of multinational capital, and the increased traffic of students and businessmen between Taiwan
and the United States, not to mention that between Taiwan and English-speaking metropoles
such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Manila, Philipppines. This is due to
the unchallenged hegemony of U.S. finance capital in Asia and elsewhere, in collaboration with
Japan.
Taiwan is wealthy and able to import labor from outside. Not only are the Taiwanese middle
class and elite taking advantage of cheap Filipino labor as such; they are also motivated to invest
money to expose their children to a source of linguistic capital as Filipina maids who speak a
version of American English. Lan observes: “As English has become a vital tool for the
Taiwanese middle class to pursue upward mobility in the global economy, hiring a well-educated
English-speaking Filipina maid is a double-edged sword—it may validate their recently achieved
status, but also may challenge their employer’s authority” (2003, 139). The challenge is more
psychological than real, at best a sign that the measure of status is variable and relative.
The field of English thus becomes the theater of conflict, of class and ethnic struggle between
collectivities personified by the individuals in the relationship. The uneven development of the
capitalist world-system has made Filipinos inferior nationals compared to Taiwanese citizens in
general. Lan explains the complicity of global English with the class/status dynamics of a
specific locale: “In Taiwan, English has never been a dominant language, a condition that
increases the relative value of this linguistic capital and enlarges the gray area for symbolic
struggle around English in transnationial domestic employment” (2003, 153).
Domestic work for most Filipinas bears the stigma of downward mobility and lack of
personal freedom. They of course realize that as a group they function as a status marker for
Taiwanese employers whose habitus (condescending verbal rhetoric, distant body language)
based on wealth and ethnic belonging arises from the deferential behavior of their hired servants.
These employers (educated businessmen, professionals, intelligentsia) legitimize their social
status as liberal-minded citizens of a democratic polity who treat their workers with respect; on
the other hand, those employers without linguistic skills to “place demands on” their foreign help
fail to exercise their proper authority so that the maids appear to interact as “guests” who in turn,
isolated and marginalized by government regulations, contrive individualistic strategies of
coping with their situation. For example, they disavow their role of “maids” in relation to other
nationals (Indonesians, Thais) and local unschooled workers who don’t speak English.
Filipina domestics maneuver to insulate themselves from the constraints of authority with the
belief that their language performance gives them cultural superiority, given the libidinal
investment of value in American English and its power to command recognition. Such behavior
may be a matter of self-deception, but it has anchorage in the objective value given to English in
Taiwan and in the Philippies. In so doing, the domestics may perhaps be able to negotiate for
favorable terms in their contract. To this extent, they feel empowered even though subsumed in
the unequal relation between employer and employee, made worse by the fact that the Taiwanese
government guarantees that the Filipina has no recourse to an impartial body for adjudication and
redress of grievances. Hence, the Filipina domestic is a modern slave whose entire selfhood has
been commodified; if she breaks the contract, or runs away, she is imprisoned and penalized. In
the final analysis, however much this mode of symbolic resistance may compensate for the
Filipinas’ subordination, the “field” of English is still overdetermined by the economic and
national disparity between these two peoples, two nation-states.
In the transnational context of overseas contractual labor analyzed here, the orthodox
standard of Anglo-American English asserts itself in an arbitrary way. We know for a fact that
because of infinite variations no criterion of standardness can apply to spoken English. But of
course that is a defensive stance of those empowered by citizenship and money. While some
Taiwanese with less linguistic capital expect Filipina maids to do house chores and at the same
time tutor their children, the educated middle-class parents refuse to expose their children to
“bad,” “substandard” or “unrefined” English accent. The value of the domestic’s linguistic
capital is thus limited and not quite legitimate, even though intelligible. Ironically, this resource
has earned Filipinas an extra workload as well as the negative association of not being maid-like,
a deviant from the stereotype, and therefore threatening. That may explain the drastic decline of
Filipina domestic workers in Taiwan from 83% in 1998 to 17% in 2002 (Lan 2003, 155); they
have been replaced by Indonesians who are forced to learn Mandarian Chinese or Holo-
Taiwanese. There is then a limit to the possibilities of negotiating identity and class locations
within the sphere of linguistic exchange, even though the field of English continues to function
as the site of symbolic micropolitics and the means of enacting symbolic domination and
resistance in daily practices of communication and work transactions.
Hoping for Translation
What lessons can we gather at this conjuncture? Utterances and speech-acts in English
performed in Taiwan, or in any specific place of encounter between unequal social groups, will
necessarily reveal the nature of globalization and its contradictions. This is perhaps a trivial
observation by now. What makes it cautionary if not salutary is the fact that we cannot accede to
a concept of world, international or global English based on the largest number of users, however
utopian this might seem, without a passage through those historical episodes and sequences of
cultural and political struggles instanced earlier.
The current “war on terrorism” led by the unchallenged military might of one nation-state,
the United States, seems to mock the vision of a unified peaceful planet enjoying the beatific
rewards of what Jurgen Habermas calls “communicative rationality.” We are in fact still in the
middle of raging “culture wars”—the wars of Identities and Differences, if one might indulge in
scholastic euphemism--conducted not just in English but in various languages, dialects, idioms,
and channels. The transnationalization of the world economy on the basis of an unequal
international division of labor and of rewards, the sharpening polarity between the few rich
metropolitan nation-states of the North and the numerous impoverished peoples of the South, are
sequences of events that unleash tremors undermining any confidence that the prophecy of a
global language free from errors in grammar, syntax and pronunciation will soon come to pass.
The narrative of English as a universal literary medium may promise a hopeful turn in the
journey from the Tower of Babel. When postcolonial theorists at the turn of the century
announced the decentering of the Eurocentric canon, they also celebrated the advent of
“englisches” in which numerous postcolonial texts will be written. Of course, the authors of The
Empire Writes Back also welcomed the cultivation of indigenous writing. But their concern was
the counter-discursive maneuvers, not homologous practices, the abrogative and appropriative
tasks of Commonwealth writers who were engaged in the “rereading and the rewriting of the
European historical and fictional record.” With the concept of a standard English exploded,
Ashcroft and his colleagues contend that postcolonial literature “undermines any project for
literary studies in english which is postulated on a single culture masquerading as the originating
centre” (1989, 196).
With the new paradigm of an international english studies, we will see the parity of all
forms of English, a utopian idea akin to the “linguistic communism” implied by Saussure’s and
other linguist’s doctrine that a common language is a treasure equally shared by all, that
everyone is at heart competent to form grammatically meaningful sentences despite minor flaws
in our actual performances. We know that this illusion of equivalence—if there are still such
naïve or utopian speculators in values--hides the near incommensurability of the use-values that
endow the exchange with human purpose and social worth.
We cited before Gandhi, Ngugi, and Constantino’s arguments that English historically served
as an efficient agent of colonial subjugation. Usage of the colonizer’s tongue inevitably led to
imprisonment within the conceptual paradigms of the conqueror (with some exceptions), and that
attempts to abrogate or adapt it only reinforced bondage. It has in fact produced the despotic
comprador and oligarchic elite in many nominally independent countries that remain virtual
neocolonies (for example, the Philippines), a subservience mediated this time through
WTO/WB/IMF. The key concepts of abrogation and appropriation beloved by postcolonial
critics are deployed to justify the prudential tactic of usurping the dominant language, together
with its discursive forms and modes of representation (in theater, film, political organization,
everyday practices, etc.), in order to adapt them to express liberatory experiences and
emancipatory ideals. Among the practitioners of this postcolonial mode are Chinua Achebe and
Salman Rushdie. This resort to a counter-discourse can be illustrated, for example, by the
writings of Jose Rizal, the Filipino national hero, who cleverly used Spanish to criticize the
colonizer’s cruelty and injustice, but it is not the only strategy that the colonized peoples have
devised to defeat their enemies.
In any case, I cite here Achebe’s project of trying to appropriate the imperial language to
intervene in the dominant public sphere and interpolate an “articulatory style” that captures more
authentically the subaltern’s situation and experience. Achebe is not naïve; he is fully cognizant
of language’s complicity in the savage repression of his compatriots. Achebe’s principle of
expropriation is echoed by many Filipino writers in English and their counterparts in the “third
world”:
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different
kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his
message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of
international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which
is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience…. I feel that English will
be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new
English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new
African surroundings (quoted in Crystal 1997, 136).
In the same vein, the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. believes that learning the
Master’s tongue is for many black artists “an act of empowerment” (1990, 44). Behind this
pragmatic outlook is the view that language can be conceived as an instrument, or else it is the
scene of manifold struggles in which usage dictates the form and content of language. We need
not reject this outright, or endorse it completely without evaluating the concrete conditions of our
intervention in changing our lives and environments.
As noted earlier, Bakhtin/Voloshinov, Wittgenstein, speech-act theorists, Louis Helmslev,
and Bourdieu have all proposed this conception of language as a contradictory space of the
struggle of multiple forces at any given historic conjuncture. Words are multiaccentual
depending on the users and their locations vis-à-vis one another. This leads to certain
possibilities of converting or translating the dominant patterns of language-use for subversive
and emancipatory ends. However, as we have seen in the case of Filipina maids using English in
Taiwanese households, such possibilities are defined and limited by variables such as the
position of the collective to which the speaker/writer belongs, the alignment of these groups and
the power imbalance among them, the linguistic and cultural capital each group can mobilize in
the struggle, who controls state power and ideological apparatuses, and so on. In short, the space
for counter-discourse and appropriation is not an infinite horizon open to endless ambivalence,
hybridity, or play. Agency has no meaning apart from the structures and institutions that both
enable and limit the power of individuals and collective historical protagonists of the cultural and
social field (San Juan 2001).
The Conversation Begins
Notwithstanding the inertia of the status quo, globalization harbors limits and
possibilities for change. What these changes will be, particularly in relation to English as a
world language, cannot be fully discerned and appraised without continuing concrete
analysis and empirical investigation. Any inquiry into the fate of English as a global
language cannot escape the contradictory tensions between the local and the global (Jay
2001). What is actually happening today, as attested to by the flourishing of “world
literature written in English” or englishes, is, on one hand, the continued expansion of
teaching/learning English because of its association with economic prosperity, progress in
science and technology (electronic communication), material development and

modernization, this last including postmodern forms of American mass popular culture.
On the other side, as Richard W. Bailey reports, there are developments countering the
evolution of English as a global language, contemporary trends such as demographics
(already mentioned earlier), nationalism and its politics of language, multilingualism
(particularly in the United States, but also in Britain, Canada, and Australia), and, finally,
the attitudes of those acquiring English as a new language, which, for Bailey, is a category
more important than aptitude, age, or teaching method. In countries like India or Nigeria, as
well as in the Philippines, the nationalist arguments against English as a literary and
expressive means of communication, and in favor of the local or national languages, have
grown in strength and influence since the formal independence of these countries. Both the
forces of linguistic nationality and political nationality, not to mention assorted religious
fundamentalisms everywhere, have to be weighed in the balance as they contend with the
thrust of transnational corporations (aided by WB/IMF/WTO) waving its banner of
international or world English replete with the vocabulary of loans, military aid, and capital
investments. This “free” flow is a far cry from the universalism of traditional aesthetics that
Ihab Hassan, one academic discontented with consumerist globalization, invokes: “literature
is the site where the local and the global, the concrete and the universal imaginatively
transact the enigma of the human” (1999, 66). This begs so many questions that we cannot
even attend to its banality and bathos.
As for multilingualism, the reaction called “English Only Movement” may serve as a
revealing symptom of the multiplicity of linguistic practices, utterances, speech-acts, in the
United States—the heteroglossia of a multicultural democracy in the making (for the pros
and cons of the debate, see Fischer et al, 1997). I regret to add that at present this prospect is
being stifled by the retooled version of “Manifest Destiny” known as the USA Patriot Act”
in the name of an unquestioned “national security,” of the defense of a putatively
beleaguered Homeland. There is of course in the U.S. a deeply ingrained nativist opposition
to bilingual and multicultural competence. We don’t need to cede the terrain of
“globalization” to English, Mary Louise Pratt urges her colleagues. Her message is timely
and urgent: “To monolingual anglophones it may look like everyone in the world is learning
English, but the more accurate statement, visible from where we stand, is that the world is
becoming increasingly multilingual. Many people learn a kind of instrumental English as an

international lingua franca. But anglophones place themselves at a great disadvantage if they
rely solely on this medium to conduct their relations with the rest of the planet” (1995, 62).
And so, in addition to learning world English, we should prepare for multilingualism as the
best equipment for living in an age of untrammeled globalization.
Language, more precisely discourses or signifying practices, not literature in high
canonical specimens, deserves priority for us. While globalization may unite distant spaces,
it also produces multiple concrete places that differ from one another. Homogeneity begets
the heterogeneous, to put it aphoristically. Just to give a sample of what accounts for the
popularity of English as a second or alternative language of choice. Edward Said captures
the ambiguous nature of the field of English in this description of his visit to one of the
universities of a Persian Gulf state in 1958:
The reason for the large numbers of students taking English was given frankly by a
somewhat disaffected instructor: many of the students proposed to end up working for
airlines, or banks, in which English was the world-wide lingua franca. This all but
terminally consigned English to the level of a technical language stripped of expressive
and aesthetic characteristics and denunded of any critical or self-conscious dimension.
You learned English to use computers, respond to orders, transmit telexes, decipher
manifests, and so forth. That was all. The other thing I discovered, to my alarm, was
that English such as it was existed in what seemed to be a seething caldron of Islamic
revivalism (1993, 305).
Said’s anecdote conveys a realistic picture and a balanced assessment; it also confirms
our thesis that globalization is essentially a contradictory and sometimes contingent process.
Globalization—consumerism on a world scale--midwived by corporate conglomerates based
in the North is not a predetermined fate for all peoples. We have alluded to all kinds of
resistance, including the Filipina domestic’s tactic of self-assertion. Nor can we yield to the
easy proposition that the “deconstruction of the ‘autonomized’ global institutions of late
modernity” can be achieved through sheer “cultural will” (Tomlinson 1991, 178), for the
narrative of counter-hegemonic resistance mounted by various localities encompasses
elements beyond culture, language, art—in fact, they embrace civilizations founded on
distinctive world-views, universalizing constructions of reality, cosmological beliefs(Abu-
Lughod 1997).
I conclude with a prophecy that contradicts the earlier thesis of language as a political
and ideological weapon. What provides hope is one effect of globalization already
confirmed by the proliferation of englisches: the delinking of languages and territories, and
the prospect of productive transactions between cultures and language fields. Walter
Mignolo argues that the English in postpartition India no longer bears the same memory as
national English in Britain, nor does the English spoken in UK by third world immigrants
carry “the same cultural and ideological weight as the King’s English.” This uncoupling of
languages and nations, languages and national memories, languages and national literature,
“is creating the conditions for and enacting the relocation of languages and the fracture of
cultures,” making it problematic for concepts of cultures and civilizations to serve as
homogeneous fields for people with common interests, goals, memories, and beliefs.
Mignolo draws the following inference: “if English is becoming the universal language of
scholarship, English is not carrying with it the conceptual weight and value of Western
scholarship. My contention is that something similar to what happens in literature is
happening in cultures of scholarship: a border gnoseology is emerging at the intersection of
Western epistemology and non-Western knowledge, characterized as ‘wisdom’ by the
former.” This is a good sign for initiating projects of translation and solidarity of action
across nation-states: “What we are facing here is no longer spaces in between or hybridity,
in the convivial images of contact zones, but the forces of ‘barbarian’ theorizing and
rationality….’Border gnoseology’ (rather than epistemology) in all its complexity
(geocultural, sexual, racial, national, diasporic, exilic, etc.) is a new way of thinking that
emerges from the sensibilities and conditions of everyday life created by colonial legacies
and economic globalization” (1998, 45-46). Using English in his scholarly discourse,
Mignolo seeks to transcend the barbaric legacy of the “civilizing mission” by a border
gnosis which, it seems, will have to invent a new language, a more extensive lingua franca,
out of the ruins and inheritances of the past.
II. The “National Language” as Arena of Counter-Hegemonic Struggle
In this current situation of portentous upheaval in the Philippines, any discussion of the
“language question,” like the “woman question,” is bound to be imcendiary and contentious. The
issue of language is always explosive, a crux of symptoms afflicting the body politic. It is like a
fuse or trigger that ignites a whole bundle of inflammable issues, scandalously questioning the
existence of God in front of an audience of believers. Or the immortality of souls among the
faithful. Perhaps my saying outright that I am a partisan for a national language, Filipino, may
outrage the postmodernists and cosmopolites among you—how can you say such a thing when
you are speaking in English? Or, as Senator Diokno once said, “English of a sort.” How dare I
infuriate the loyal speakers of Cebuano, Ilocano, Pampagueno, Ilonggo, Taglish, Filipino
English, and a hundred or more languages used in these seven hundred islands. One gives up: it
can’t be helped. Or we can help lift the ideological smog and draw the lines of demarcation in
the battleground more lucidly.
One suspects that this is almost unavoidable, in a society where to raise the need for one
national language, say “Filipino” (as mandated by the Constitution) is bound to arouse
immediate opposition. Or, if not immediately, it is deferred and sublimated into other pretexts for
debate and argumentation. Fortunately, we have not reached the point of armed skirmishes and
violent confrontations for the sake of our mother-father tongue, as in India and other countries.
My partisanship for Filipino (not Tagalog) is bound to inflame Cebuanos, Bicolanos, Ilocanos,
and so on, including Filipino speakers-writers of English, or Filipino English. We probably try to
defuse any brewing conflict quickly by using the colonizer’s tongue, or compromise babel-wise.
My viewis that only a continuing historical analysis can help explain the present contradictory
conjuncture, and disclose the options it offers us. Only engagement in the current political
struggles can resolve the linguistic aporia/antinomy and clarify the import and consequence of
the controversy over the national language, over the fate of Filipino and English in our society.
One would expect that this issue has been resolved a long time ago. But, given the dire
condition of the Philippine political economy in this epoch of globalized terrorism of the U.S.
hegemon, a plight that is the product of more than a century of colonial/neocolonial domination,
all the controversies surrounding this proposal of a national language since the time of the
Philippine Commonwealth when Quezon convened the Institute of National Language under
Jaime de Veyra, have risen again like ravenous ghouls. I believe this specter can never be
properly laid to rest until we have acquired genuine sovereignty, until national self-determination
has been fully exercised, and the Filipino people—three thousand everyday, more than a million
every year--will no longer be leaving in droves as Overseas Contract Workers, the whole nation
becoming a global subaltern to the transnational corporations, to the World Bank-World Trade
Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the predatory finance capital of the global
North. We cannot help but be interpellated by the sirens of the global market and transformed
into exchangeable warm bodies, we can at least interrogate the conditions of our
subordination—if only as a gesture of resistance by a nascent, irrepressible agency.
In the hope of avoiding such a situation, which is almost ineluctable, I would like to offer
the following seven theses that may initiate a new approach to the question, if not offer heuristic
points of departure for reflection. In contrast to the dominant neoliberal idealist-culturalist,
metaphysical approach, I apply a historical materialist one whose method is not only
historicizing and dialectical—not merely deploying the “Aufhebung” of Hegel within an eclectic,
neoWeberian framework (as Fernando Zialcita does in his provocative book--Authentic Though
Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity (2005)—but also, as Marx said, standing it on its head in
the complex and changing social relations of production within concrete historical settings. The
materialist dialectic offers a method of analysis and elucidation of the context in which questions
about a national language can be clarified and the nuances of its practical implications
elaborated.
In addition, I would like to stress the key distinction that needs to be made, following
Gramsci’s teaching on hegemony and the national-popular strategy discussed earlier, when we
apply a historical-materialist optic on this terrain. First of all, as Peter Ives (2006) reminds us, we
need to establish a dialectical connection between the communicative or pragmatic aspect of
language with its expressive dimension, its role in identity and cultural formation integrally tied
to the development of the nation-state. Those two aspects are engaged in the complex protracted
process of the ongoing national-democratic revolution. In contrast to the liberal/neoliberal
emphasis on the utilitarian/communicative function of language, a historical-materialist mode of
critical analysis would concern itself with how language use interacts with the concepts and
empirical actualization of “passive revolution,” “subalternity,” and “common sense,” in
particular, with the formation of a national-popular collective will needed for the radical
egalitarian transformation of the feudal/capitalist mode of production and social relations toward
a democratic, socialist mode of production relations. Ultimately the policy debate on choosing a
national language is a political question. Without investigating these linkages, any inquiry into
the “national language” predicament would simply replicate the old exploitative order and
reinforce imperialist hegemony based on “global English” and its various seductive alibis.
Thesis 1: Language is not an entity or phenomenon in itself but a component of the social
forms of consciousness of any given social formation. As such, it can only be properly addressed
within the historical specificity of a given mode of production and attendant social-political
formation. It has no history of its own but is a constituent and constitutive of the ideological
terrain on which the struggle of classes and historic blocs are fought, always in an uneven and
combined mode of development. It forms part of the conflicted evolution of the integral state, as
Gramsci conceived it as the combination of political society and civil society. The issue of
language is located right at the heart of the construction of this integral state. Hence not only its
synchronic but also diachronic dimensions should be dialectically comprehended in grasping its
worth and contribution to the liberation and fulfillment of the human potential.
Thesis 2: The function and nature of language then cannot be adequately discussed in a
neutral and positivistic-empiricist way, given its insertion into conflicted relations of production,
at least since the emergence of class-divided societies in history. In the Philippines, the status
and function of various languages—Spanish, English, and the numerous vernaculars or regional
languages—cannot be assayed without inscribing them in the history of colonial and neocolonial
domination of the peoples in these islands. In this regard, the terms “national-popular” and
“nation-people”—as Gramsci employed them in a historical-materialist discourse--should be
used in referring to Filipinos in the process of expressing themselves as diverse communities,

interpellating other nationalities, and conducting dialogue with themselves and other conversers.
It is necessary to assert the fundamental premise of the “national-popular,” the nation as
constituted by the working masses (in our country, workers and peasants), not the patricians.
Otherwise, the nation (in the archive of Western-oriented or Eurocentric history) is usually
identified with the elite, the propertied classes, the national bourgeoisie, or the comprador
bourgeoisie and its allies, the bureaucrats and feudal landlords and their retinue of gangsters,
private armies, paramilitary thugs, etc. Actually, today, we inhabit a neocolony dominated by a
comprador-bureaucratic bloc of the propertied classes allied with and supported in manifold
ways by the U.S. hegemon and its regional accomplices.
Thesis 3: The Filipino nation is an unfinished and continuing project, an unfinished work,
constantly being re-invented but not under conditions of its own making. Becoming Filipinos is a
process of decolonization and radical democratization of the social formation, a sequence of
collective choices. This is almost a cliché among the progressive forces with a nationalist
orientation. It bears repeating that Filipino sovereignty is a dynamic totality whose premises are
political independence and economy self-sufficiency. We have not yet achieved those premises.
Given the current alignment of nation-states in the world-system under U.S. hegemony,
whose hegemony is unstable, precarious, sustained by manifold antagonisms, and perpetually
challenged by other regional blocs, becoming Filipino is an ever-renewing trajectory of creation
and re-creation, a process overdetermined by legacies of the past and unpredictable incidences of
the present and the future. Within this configuration, an evolving, emergent Filipino language
may be conceived as both a medium and substantive element in fashioning this sequence of
becoming-Filipino, a sequence grasped not as a cultural essence but a network of dynamic
political affiliations and commitments. It is also an aesthetic modality of hegemonic expression.
Thesis 4: Only within the project of achieving genuine, substantive national

independence and egalitarian democracy can we argue for the need for one national language as
an effective means of unifying the masses of peasants, workers and middle strata and allowing
them integral participation in a hegemonic process.
Note that this is not just a question of cultural identity.
Without changing the unequal and unjust property/power relations, a distinctive Filipino
culture incorporating all the diverse elements that have entered everyday lives of the masses can
not be defined and allowed to flourish. Without the prosperous development of the material
resources and political instrumentalities, a Filipino cultural identity can only be an artificial,
hybrid fabrication of the elite—an excrescence of global consumerism, a symptom of the power
of transnationalized commodity-fetishism that, right now, dominates the popular consciousness
via the mass media, in particular television, films, music, food and fashion styles, packaged life-
styles that permeate the everyday practices of ordinary Filipinos across class, ethnicities, age
and localities.
The consumerist habitus (to use Bourdieu’s concept) acquired from decades of colonial
education and indoctrination has almost entirely occupied the psyche of every Filipino, except
for those consciously aware of it and collectively resisting it. With the rise of globalization, it has
been a fashionable if tendentious practice among the floating litterateurs, mostly resident in
colleges and universities, to advocate the maintenance of the status quo; that is, English as the
prestigious language, Taglish as the media lingua franca, and Filipino and the other languages as
utilitarian devices for specific tasks. But soon we find that this imitated
pluralistic/multiculturalist stand only functions as the effective ploy of neoliberal finance capital.
This seemingly pragmatist, accomodationist stance ultimately serves neocolonial goals: the
Filipino as world-citizen as compensation for its lack of effective national sovereignty. Its
obverse is regional/ethnic separatism. The culturalist or civilizationalist program, often linked to
NGOs and deceptive philanthropic schemes, skips the required dialectical mediation and posits
an abstract universality, though disguised in a self-satisfied particularism now in vogue among
postcolonial deconstructionists eulogizing the importance of place, locality, indigeneity, organic
roots, etc.
We discover in time that this trend serves as a useful adjunct for enhancing the
festishistic magic, aura and seductive lure of commodities—from brand-name luxury goods to
the whole world of images, sounds and multimedia confections manufactured by the
transnational culture industry and marketed as symbolic capital for the pettybourgeoisie of the
periphery and other subalternized sectors within the metropole.
Thesis 5: Spanish and English are global languages needed for communication and
participation in world affairs. They are recognized as richly developed languages of aesthetic and
intellectual power useful for certain purposes—English particularly in the scientific and technical
fields. But they have a political history and resonance for “third world peoples” who have
suffered from their uses. Its sedimented patterns of thought and action cannot so easily be
ignored or elided. The discursive genres of law, business, etc. in English and their
institutionalized instrumentalities cannot be judged on their own terms without understanding the
political role they played as effective instruments in the colonial domination of the various
peoples in the Philippines and their total subordination to the political-cultural hegemony of the
Spanish empire, and then of the American empire from 1899 to 1946, and of U.S. neocolonial
control after formal independence in 1946. Everyone knows that while Rizal used Spanish to
reach an enlightened Spanish public and an ilustrado-influenced audience, the masses who
participated in the Malolos Republic and the war against the Americans used Tagalog, and other
vernaculars, in fighting for cultural autonomy and national independence. Historically the
national and democratic project of the Philippine revolution—still unfinished and
continuing—provides the only viable perspective within which we can explore the need for a
national language as a means of uniting and mobilizing the people for this project.
Thesis 6: The use and promotion of a national language does not imply the neglect,
elimination, or inferiorization of other regional languages spoken and used by diverse
communities involved in the national-democratic struggle. In fact, it implies their preservation
and cultivation. But that is contingent on the attainment of genuine national sovereignty and the
emancipation of the masses, their integration into active participation in governance. Meanwhile,
in the course of the national-liberation struggle, all languages should and are being used for
mobilization, political education, and cultural self-affirmation. Simultaneously, the
dissemination and development of one national language becomes a political and economic-
cultural necessity for unifying the diverse communities under a common political
program—which does not imply a monolithic ideological unity-- in front of the monstrous power
of finance-capital using English as an instrument of subordination and neocolonial aggression.
In this regard, I would argue that the unity and collective pride attendant on the use of
one national language provides the groundwork and fundamental requisite for the promotion and
development of other ethnic/regional languages within the national polity. This is a

psychological-ideological imperative that cannot be deferred.
Thesis 7: Hegemony, the moral and intellectual leadership of the Filipino working
masses, the scaffold within which an authentic Filipino identity can grow, assumes the rise of
organic Filipino intellectuals who will use and develop Filipino as the evolving national
language. Again, this does not mean suppressing other regional languages. Nor does it mean
prohibiting the use and teaching of English or other international languages (Spanish, French,
Chinese, etc.). It simply means the establishment of a required platform, basis or foundation,
without which the productive forces of the people within this particular geopolitical boundary
can be harnessed, refined, and released in order to, first, benefit the physical and spritual health
of Filipinos, repair and recover the damage inflicted by centuries of colonial oppression and
exploitation, and thus be able to contribute to the cultural heritage of humankind. Without
national self-determination, there is no way Filipinos can contribute their distinctive share in
global culture. In fact, it is impossible to be a global citizen unless you have fully grown and
matured as an effective democratic participant in the making of a prosperous, egalitarian nation-
people in a historically specific territory defined by a whole concretely differentiated sequence of
events not replicated elsewhere.
Historical examples are often misleading, but sometimes elucidatory. It may be irrelevant and
even Eurocentric to invoke the examples of Italy and Germany as nations that experienced
unified mobilization through the affirmation of national-popular languages, Italy vis-à-vis the
Papal ascendancy, and Germany vis-à-vis Latin/Roman Catholic hegemony. In any case, again,
the social and historical function and character of language cannot be adequately grasped without
situating them in the complex dynamics of the conflict of social classes in history since the
break-up of the communal tribes in the hunting-gathering stage, since the rise of private property
in the means of production, and the intricate dialectics of culture and collective psyche in the
political economy of any social formation. In short, language is not just a permanently
undecidable chain of signifiers, always deconstructing itself and falling into abysmal
meaninglessness, but a social convention and a site of struggle, the signifier as “an arena of class
struggle,” to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase. I believe that only from this historical materialist
perspective, and within the parameters of the political project of attaining genuine autonomy as a
nation-people, can the discussion of a Filipino national language be intelligible and productive.
But, again, such a discussion finds its value and validity as part of the total engagement of the
people for justice, equality, and all-sided emancipation from the nightmares of the past and the
terrorist fascism of the present.
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###
ABSTRACT
Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “field,” this essay explores the historical limits and
possibilities of English as an international vehicle of communication. The use of globalized
English is overdetermined by the facts of colonial sedimentation (Filipino migrant subalterns)
and the comprador status of employers in “newly industrialized” societies like Taiwan.
Hierarchies of class, nation, and race complicate the fate of “English” in a field where
homogenizing and heterogenizing forces interact. Globalizing commodification ultimately
defines the situation of “English” as the hegemonic lingua franca even as it opens up the horizon
for the emergence of a plurality of “englisches” in a world witnessed by the resurgence of
religious fundamentalism and ethnic particularisms especially after 9/11/2001.

The Language Question in The Philippines

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The Language Question in The Philippines

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San Juan/Philippines

GLOBAL ENGLISH VERSUS FILIPINO; or

“SNEAKING INTO THE PHILIPPINES,” BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON: An

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

It is not my thinking that language constitutes differences. There is an access via

---ALAIN BADIOU, Infinite Thought

I. “English” in the Globalized Capitalist System

The Numbers Game

conquered Mexicans here is part of a process of subjugation and disciplinarization, with

The Philippine Example

Spanish colonialism Westernized the Filipino principally through religion. American

Give and Take, More or Less

Hoping for Translation

The Conversation Begins

science and technology (electronic communication), material development and

becoming increasingly multilingual. Many people learn a kind of instrumental English as an

II. The “National Language” as Arena of Counter-Hegemonic Struggle

used in referring to Filipinos in the process of expressing themselves as diverse communities,

Thesis 4: Only within the project of achieving genuine, substantive national

development of other ethnic/regional languages within the national polity. This is a

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