The Philippine National Language [Part 1 of 3 series]

The Clearing Point

R. CHAM G. ZUÑIGA VI, Ll.B., MLGM, Ph.D.

The Philippine National Language

[Part 1 of 3 series]

A country need to have a national language. The existence of a national language promotes national unity and geographic and political solidarity. Like any other country, Philippine has gone through a lot of stages to have a national language.

The Philippines has no national language in the early period. Instead, the different regions of the Philippines used different languages. History shows that the native Filipinos mostly spoke the Austronasian Language.

Later in the history, Filipino was named officially as the national language of the Philippines. Filipino is an Austronesian language that is based on various existing native languages in the Philippines. Noticeably, there are a considerable number of Spanish words in the vocabulary. The Austronesian languages are language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia.

It was in 1925 when President Manuel L. Quezon conceived the idea of having a national language for the Filipino people. However, it was during the Commonwealth period that the search for a national language was first officially recognized.

The 1935 Philippine Constitution gave more meaning and importance for the need of a national language. Section 3 mandates for the Congress to take steps toward the development and adoption of a common national language based on one of the existing native languages. With this mandate, on November 19, 1936, the Institute of National Language was established through Commonwealth Act No. 148. It was created for the purpose of development of a common national language.

As a consensus, Tagalog was heavily favored because it has the most number of highly developed literatures and was considered as the best-studied language during that time. On December 30, 1937 the national language based on Tagalog dialect came through Executive Order No. 134. On December 30, 1939, Tagalog officially became the National Language of the Philippines.

Opposition to the official declaration of Tagalog as national language was then evident. The visayan objected from the fact that in terms of numbers of speakers, Visayan has an overwhelmingly large number of speakers than the Tagalog. In 1960s, Geruncio Lacuesta, a lawyer and an editor of KATAS magazine, questioned the Tagalog alphabet, the orthography and the vocabulary. He even demanded for a distinction between the vernacular Tagalog and the National Language.

Lacuesta described Filipino (not Tagalog), the national language based on the lingua franca of Cosmpolitan Manila. He then lobbied for a Filipino language that incorporate terms from Spanish and English as well as other Philippine languages. He complained that "alchemists" at the Institute of National Language had reduced the Filipino alphabet to 20 letters, and were trying to fit borrowed words into this reduced alphabet, or to "invent" completely new terms.

Lacuesta was then for a quest for a "pure" national language, culminating with the decision in 1959 to call the national language "Pilipino" rather than "Filipino" and to adopt a Tagalog-based grammar and orthography or spelling system. One example he cited was the word salumpuwit (very loose English translation: ass-catcher ) to mean a chair.

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