Communities strive to save dying languages

BAGUIO CITY – Every town has stories about how its indigenous language or dialect started to disappear, abetted by generations of disuse and a media culture that speaks only in English and Filipino.

Linguists, communication researchers and social scientists shared their woeful tales during the National Wika (Language) Summit held at the University of the Philippines (UP) Baguio last month.

But this year, many have happy endings.

The Waray language has been dissected and provided its own orthography (writing system), which includes a uniformly accepted spelling manual, says researcher Evangeline de la Cruz.

Ibaloi dictionaries and learning manuals abound and many young Ibalois have started to seek the language, says UP Baguio communication professor Jimmy Fong. His colleague, language professor Purificacion Delima, says communities in northern Luzon have started publishing newspapers in the vernacular.

Lolita Delgado-Fangsler, president of the Mangyan Heritage Center, says Mangyan communities are promoting the use of their ancient script or native alphabet.

According to Glenn Stallsmith, director of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), local languages are in trouble, and half of those spoken in the world may disappear in the next 100 years.

A global economy, which requires a common language for business transactions and official communication, has encouraged many countries to endorse universally spoken languages, such as English, to be taught in schools, or used in government documents, he says.

He says it was also practical for a multicultural country, such as the Philippines and Indonesia, to establish a common language for social, cultural and political transactions.

The decades-old debate that language deterioration was traced to the government’s imposition of Tagalog-based Filipino as the official national language had been the dominating theme of most language conferences in the past—a subject outlined by National Artist for Literature Virgilio Almario.

But advances in studies offered experts a different point of view about the impact of globalization on Philippine languages.

Stallsmith says aversion toward the power of global media has pushed researchers to advocate regulation of imported media, such as MTV (the music television channel).

“Global media is a virtual tsunami” and to “ignore its impact would be foolish,” he says. But so is treating the media as “the enemy,” he says.

He cites case studies indicating that youths immersed in pop culture are emboldened to be creative, often using the medium for which they are most comfortable with, such as their own languages.

The way to preserve a dying language is to use it, he says.

Stallsmith says experts may help by building a linguistics database, to which communities may resort to in reviving their native tongue.

This process has helped develop an accepted writing manual for Waray, an oral language, says De la Cruz, who studied the spoken Visayan language with Ma. Rocini Tenasas, Regalado Tupaz, Michael Carlo Villas and Voltaire Oyzon for a paper read at the summit.