With the emergence of English language being very popular and instrumental either in formal venues or informal gatherings, technological advancements, and social media popularity, many languages in the Philippines have started to be dying, or some are already considered extinct. According to Ethnologue, a compendium of world languages, 28 Philippine languages now are in trouble, up from 13 in 2016. Eleven languages are dying, and several are already extinct namely Dicamay Agta, Katabaga, Tayabas Ayta and Villaviciosa Agta. The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has identified the Philippines as being one of the top 10 “language hotspots” of the world, which means that the Philippines has a wealth of languages but they are being lost at a rate faster than we can adequately document them.
As a Filipino teacher in high school, this situation is very alarming. Based from my observation and assessment, there are still students who reached high school but still cannot even comprehend a story written in Filipino. This is in contrast to supposed ability of my students to understand Filipino language because we are located in an area where Filipino is the mother tongue. This situation can actually equate to those of other areas where some Filipino languages and dialects are dying.
On one hand, Michael Cahil (2019), stated that a language is endangered when it is in fairly imminent danger of dying out. Cahill states two ways to quickly recognize when a language is on its way to death. One is when the children in the community are not speaking the language of their parents, and the other is when there are only a small number of people left in the ethnolinguistic community: The language dies because the entire people group dies. This second reason was especially common in the Amazon and in North America in the 19th and 20th centuries.
On the other hand, Michael Krauss’s (1992) definition is yet more inclusive: that all languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers are endangered. That is 52% of the world’s languages, spoken by only 0.3% of the world’s population. Only 600 of the world’s languages (less than 10%) are considered as “safe” from extinction, defined as those still being learned by children (Sampat 2011). Further, Barbara Grimes (2011) has documented 450 languages spoken today that are so small that they are in the last stages of becoming extinct, with only a few elderly speakers left in each one.
The most noticeable reasons for language death are ethnocide or linguicide, or even genocide, of an indigenous group. Ethnocide is when a dominant political group attempts to purposely put an end to a people’s traditional way of life. Linguicide (linguistic genocide) is when such a dominant group tries to extinguish the language of a minority group, say by punishing anyone caught speaking it. Languages can also disappear quickly if its speakers die in some natural, or are scattered in a way that breaks up the language community. These were common reasons for language extinctions in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, however, minority languages more commonly die naturally, rather than by being systematically killed, simply by being overwhelmed by the more passive acculturative processes of the encroaching industrialized world. The Casiguran Agta case is an example of this latter situation.
We must re-evaluate our plans and come up with bearable answers now. We owe this obligation to every Filipino. To express regret after it’s too late will not take along back our languages.
As cautioned in a Unesco Atlas on endangered languages (2001), “With the death and disappearance of a language, an irreplaceable unit in our knowledge and understanding of human thought and world-view is lost forever.”
By: Celee Ann Kris Mamon |Junior High School Teacher I| Sta. Rita High School Olongapo City
