How Nationalist Motivated Language Policies Destroys a Community
In line with my previous article on Nationalism, I would like to explain how adopting nationalist motivated Language Policy destroys cultures and societies. For this article, I will use the Language Policy of the Philippines, as I am most familiar with it than any other model, pinpoint its problems and offer a better policy.
But before discussing the Language Policy of the Philippines, I would like to define what is Language Policy? To put it simply, it is a discipline under Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, that deals with studying the dialect continuum, officialization and standardization of a language in a territory. A state may adopt a monolingual model, bilingual or plurilingual language policy. In the case of the Philippines, it adopted a bilingual model. This bilingual model is based on the provisions of Article XIV, Sections 6 and 7 in the 1987 Philippine Constitution wherein they state the following accordingly: 1) The National Language of the Philippines is Filipino and 2) that the official languages of the country are Filipino and English. However, as a Linguistics major, policies based on these sections are ok, only if the Philippines had one language, and according to the data provided by KWF themselves, we have around 130 Philippine Languages.
Like I said in my previous article, Nationalist driven policies do not work, because cultural homogeneity is not natural in societies, it is like forcing each and every individual to be one and the same. A big chunk of Nationalist motivated policies is trying to homogenize a language and imposing it to non-speakers of this language. This is problematic, because most countries have more than one language being spoken. In the case of the Philippines, Tagalog was chosen to become the National Language and thus, was renamed to Filipino to promote Filipino Nationalism. As an effect of this change, the rest of the languages were labelled as dialects of this National Language, but in reality, Filipino is nothing but a standardized dialect of Tagalog with vocabulary borrowed from other Philippine languages. Aside from this change, the education system started teaching the ideology of speaking this standardized dialect as a form of love for the country or patriotism, thus labelling other non-Tagalog speakers as unpatriotic, promote sectarianism and “unauthentic” Filipinos. In other words, imposing this National Language only promoted linguistic discrimination against non-Tagalog speakers, through means of guilt and gaslighting. Aside from linguistic discrimination, it also promoted discrimination against ethnic groups, mocking them for their accents and degrading their culture as inferior. Furthermore, it also promotes language death, or worse language death.
As a proposed solution, Filipinos may opt for a plurilingual model as used in India. They can make the 8 majority languages as official languages, together with English as a bridge language. As part of the solution, I would disband the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino or KWF and make a Center for Philippine Languages, an institution where we can study the country’s languages with branches in other regions to facilitate data gathering and research, especially on minority languages. As for Spanish, it will enjoy a heritage status, because of its history and importance, and it will be studied and regulated by the Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española. Aside from that, Spanish will be made available as an option for those who wish to study it.
In conclusion, like I said in my previous article, languages should be respected and imposing one language in an ethnolinguistically diverse country will never unite a country, but rather divide it. Furthermore, it only promotes resentment and hate towards one another and by adopting the model I proposed, I think it will promote a sense of mutual respect and interest, not only culturally, but linguistically as well. We must remember to treat languages as passports and not as weapons, as they are windows to a person’s cultural identity.
