Filipino Women Writers - Language and Education

Language and Education

Contrary to the treatment received by Filipinos during the Spanish colonialists’ period, education of the Philippine citizenry was prioritized during the times of American occupation, such as the activities of the Thomasites and U.S. military personnel in the islands beginning the early 20th century. Thus, only the elite class of society – those known as the Ilustrados – preferred the use of Spanish rather than enhance and develop the native ancient scripts (baybayin), languages and dialects. Filipinos of both genders were able to obtain school and learning opportunites resulting to being educated in the English-language and a high literacy rating for a developing country like the Philippines. However, despite of this advantage, grants and similar forms of funding were not immediately available to Philippine writers, for both men and women. But in turn, in contrast to this lack of pecuniary support for writers, many works in the Filipiniana style proliferated and were written dominantly in Philippine English, but fewer however in the local maternal languages.

During the four-year Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War, the Japanese delivered the concept of “Asia to Asians,” an idea that halted the proliferation of English as the language of literature in the Philippines, because it sparked the publication and media broadcasts by means of the exclusive use of the vernacular or the “childhood languages” of Filipinos. This Japanese contribution to the Filipino’s linguistic enlightenment reawakened the already existing move towards uplifting the status of the local languages as forms of literary expression prior to the introduction and propagation of English in the Filipino archipelago. The common “languages of childhood” of the Filipinos, in general, include Tagalog, Visayan, Hiligaynon, Cebuano and Ilocano, among others.

Still, despite of the Filipino’s reawakening to their “languages of childhood”, the status of the English language returned and elevated. This rejuvenation was due in part to the spread of English-based Philippine magazines, in conjunction with the publication of serial “romantic and melodramatic” novels by women writers who wrote in their “mother tongue” through the pages of comics and magazines such as Liwayway, Bannawag, Bulaklak, Aliwan and Tagumpay.

The competition between the use of English and Filipino as main modes of communication was unrelenting even after the end of World War II, the proclamation of Philippine Independence in 1946, and the official adoption of Filipino as a second official language other than English in 1987. The persistence of this competitive phenomenon had been accounted for the economic, military and cultural association of the Philippines to the United States, the encouragement of the use of English in combination with the dialects in schools and universities, and also the need to gain a larger audience of readership. As a result, bilingualism - and even multilingualism - became the linguistic style and norm.