F/Pilipino

[daniel kaufman]

Dear Monsieur Potet,

I must correct you when you state,

>It is a well-known fact that the name of the official language of the
>Philippines is "Filipino" because the constitution of the Philippines is
>written in English, and English uses the Spanish term: Filipino.
>Once it was called "Filipino", because of the constitutionality of the
> >name, it had to be used in all the other languages of the Philippines,
> >even those - the overwhelming majority - that have no /f/.

The national language of the Philippines, prior to its current incarnation,
was called Pilipino. It was conceived as containing the basic phoneme
inventory of Tagalog and the Meso-Philippine languages which as you already
know does not include /f/. Only afterwards, in an effort to be more
inclusive of ethno-linguistic minorities and in order to assuage accusations
of Tagalog purism and "hegemony", did the language planning commission
revise the name to "Filipino" (not because the constitution was written in
English). This accompanied the inclusion of more vocabulary items from other
Philippine languages and a spelling revision for English loan words which
made them appear closer to the English. The only change that has stuck
(lamentably?) has been the renouncement of purism in favor of wholesale
borrowing; lexical items from other Philippine languages have barely made a
mark on the Filipino language.
As concerns the synchronic distinction between Filipino and Tagalog, many
Filipinos will identify certain words and idioms as "Filipino, not Tagalog".
These words and idioms belong to the Filipino academe, which has been the
only "official" institution to employ the language rigorously. From this
usage, an academic variety is indeed rapidly emerging although primarily
restricted to the social sciences. On the other hand, the progress report
from the street is not yet clear: the Filipino lingua franca, whose
ascendancy has been predicted by linguists such as Dr.Constantino for many
years now, has yet to take definite shape. Besides cultural factors, this
might be due to the lack of prestige Filipino holds as a second language,
resulting in the maintained use of the regional languages. Nonetheless,
there does exist such a lingua franca, albeit not standardized, and we can
see that the Filipino spoken in Davao for instance, is "less Tagalog" than
that spoken in Bulacan. Much like the Indonesian spoken in Manado is "less
Malay" than that spoken in Riau. The conclusion is, there are two varieties
of Tagalog developing on separate tracks which I believe may be justifiably
called Filipino; 1) the academic variety emerging from the universities and
2) the lingua franca emerging from increased inter-regional communication
and migration. Although there is no question that these are mutually
intelligible with Tagalog at the present time, we must also note that what
is called Filipino is indeed drifting from Tagalog as spoken in the Tagalog
provinces.

Sorry for the wordiness,
Daniel K.

Dept. of Linguistics
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com