The mother of all Mother Tongues: Language as part of the Bicolano Identity, Final

Finally, the issue of eliminating the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) in the MATATAG curriculum has spawned fears among Bicolanos that the Bicol mother tongue could be facing extinction. Those who entertain such thoughts are romanticizing the issue because it is not going to happen in my lifetime or an extension of such lifetime. If a Bicolano speaks other than his or her mother tongue, it is by design, but it does not mean that the person has begun the countdown for the language extinction.

Growing up in Bicol exposed me to six years of elementary education, four years of high school, and two years in college. During those years, I spoke three languages: Bicol, English, and Tagalog (Pilipino). In the community, at home since I was born, and in between classes in school, I spoke Bicol. I’ve spent another five years in the United States completing my baccalaureate degree and two years towards my masteral degree in public health with English as the official language of instruction.

Since I left the Philippines in 1975, San Diego, California has been my home with military deployments and overseas assignments in between, and the occasional trips back to the Philippines. During my 28 years of military service and 22 years professional career in federal service, English was and continues to be the spoken and written language. I speak the three languages that I know every day depending on the situation with English being the predominant language spoken.

At 70, I still speak and write in Bicol fluently because people don’t really lose their mother tongue as a matter of course. If one “loses” it, it must have been deliberately done and by design. Why? The mother tongue is part of our identity and stays with us until death. We go through life establishing our own identity, an identity that persists over time.

As evolving humans, we unfold time into what seemingly appear to be different versions. As we age and mature, we get this impression that we have transformed ourselves into something different. And, why not? All babies are born beautiful but somewhere along the way, we redefined our looks that when we look at old pictures, we ask. “That’s me?”

We all have a mind and most of us tend to keep it. With every additional knowledge that we have accumulated from kindergarten to college, and the experiences that came along with it; our minds remain the same and for every experience and decisions we had made were all shaped by our minds. The body ages, the hair falls out, eyesight dims, and a couple of wobbly knees inched us to where we want to go, but through it all, we still have our sanity that helps us remember the language we grew up with.

If our thinking is more mature, then shouldn’t our minds have evolved too? Meaning, some discernible differences from what it was back when we began crawling on our knees? Our minds play tricks on us that makes us review our own journey in reverse and as we add more birthdays, revisions come into play. But there must be something else that connects our minds to our body – a soul.

Our soul is what gives us consistency that makes us who we are today, not much different from when we were a child. What changed that affected our experiences and decisions, is ego. Ego, along with the mastered languages of our choosing, places us in a different universe that we temporarily inhabit, well, hopefully true unless we lose our minds.

We hallucinate from a distorted sense of who we are and make ourselves the center of such a universe. Thus, believing wrongly, that we have two souls with the ability of switching back and forth. Like the good soul is the rational one, and the other, well, lustful for the material world and with an unruly passion.

Power, wealth, titles among others, provide the aphrodisiac that makes us dizzily live in such a different, assumed, or parallel universe, apart from our true selves. It is when we lose these accoutrements and faux personalities that we fall back to earth and recognize that we have regained our true selves, our soul. Tatao pa palan mag-Bicol (I can still speak Bicol).

What is important is that as a community, we can communicate with and understand each other to survive the doldrums of everyday living and know full well that the current generation will always differ in many ways with the previous generation. In real life, nobody cares if we speak taglish, broken Tagalog, or speak with our diluted dialect. It is a fact of life that language and dialects do evolve right before our eyes.

Growing up in the 60’s through 70’s, nobody used the word “salamatonon” (thank you very much) in Central Bicol (Naga) that is commonly used now as part of the Bicol lexicon. Bicol has its own word for thanks – mabalos with variations for context like “po” at the end for respect, or “Dios” before the word for gratitude as a spiritual virtue, “na maray” for “thank you very much,” or with the adopted Tagalog word “salamat” as “dakulang pasalamat” for the superlative version .

“Salamatonon,” a word that can be traced perhaps to Albay or Sorsogon, is an encompassing word to capture a deeper acknowledgement of what transpired. There are other words that made their way into our day-to-day conversations by assimilation brought about by migration, travel or social media: “Hanep,” “Petmalu,” “Gimik,”Pipol,” Dedma,” “Syota,” “shit,” among others have added colors to the day-to-day vocabulary of the Filipino. These words have found their way too into the Bicol lexicon as a matter of course.

Perhaps Plato’s wisdom can illuminate our minds with his early sorties into the issue of language. Plato’s language theory can be categorized as part of mythology that Ancient Greek is well-known for, but in truth will find them with astonishing currency to the very topic bedeviling us today. Plato posited that the assignment of names is arbitrary as part of wordsmithing that is separate from the concept of studying ideas.

Meaning, any name may be given to any object (rock), and that existing names may be changed (to bato, gapo) without loss of meaning. Language is contextual, according to Plato that an individual and public need not agree with. Both can be correct thus the need for dialogue. We hear it all the time that an incident is huge but we disagree, insisting it is not. We call a man an animal or vice versa. “Hayop ka!” a wife might call a husband or a worst version, “demonyo!” Some call a dog Goliath.

In fine, reality is what people perceive it is – ideal or some phenomenon or metaphysical; and language is only a medium to express the ideal as a perfect reality, or the phenomena of the physical world that we experience outside the realm of space and time.