Language and Culture in the Philippines

=Language=

Demographics
The Philippines, a tropical archipelago with 7,100 islands, is home to 76.5 million people. Within the population, people speak over 170 mutually intelligible languages. Throughout the islands, communities speak Spanish creoles, and the indigenous languages belong to the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family. As of the May 2000 census, ten indigenous languages were spoken by more than one million people. To view a list of the languages spoken in the Philippines and learn more about their characteristics, link out to Ethnologue.

History and Education
In 1898, the United States took the Philippines from Spain and established English-only instruction within the school systems. During the Commonwealth Period (1935-1945), English continued to dominate education. In 1935, the new Filipino Constitution sough to adopt a national language based on existing native languages; they considered Tagalog, Cebuano, and Ilocano. President Manuel Quezan issued Executive Order No. 134 on December 30 announcing the Filipino national language was to be based on Tagalog. However, the use of regional languages during the first two years of school was to continue.

The 1973 Constitution, translated into all native Filipino languages, established English as the co-official language. To this day, English contiues to be the language of higher education, begining being taught during the second or third year of primary school. The 1980 census indicated that 65% of Filipinos spoke English, an increase from 44% in 1970.

In 1991, the Congressional Comission of Education established a language framework for the school systems. The first two years of elementary school were to be taught in the local vernacular, introducing Tagalog by the first or second grade, and incorporating English by the third. English was to be used to teach technical subjects, and eventually the instruction would also be translated in Tagalog.

Competition, Cooperation and Code Switching
English and Tagalog are the official languages of the Phillipines. Outside of the captial, Manila, most educated Filipinos speak at least three languages. Speakers of minority languages often speak four: the local vernacular, the regional lingua franca, Tagalog and English. With so many languages, some with only hundreds of speakers, language endangerment always looms as a possibility. A minority language may be dominated by a more popular language or may become extinct altogether. In this sense, dominant languages function as a symbol of power. For example, while the top four languages in the Philippines enjoy a notable prescence in print media as well as broadcast, Tagalog dominates the cinema. In informal settings, Code switching between English and Tagalog ("Taglish") is common as speakers combine both languages to communicate.

=Bibliography= Rubino, C.."Philippines: Language Situation." Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. 2nd ed. Ed. Keith Brown. 14 vols. Oxford: Elsevier Ltd., 2006.