THE BROADCAST MEDIA AS THE FILIPINOS’ WORST LANGUAGE TEACHER

Our Worst Language Teacher
By Jose A. Carillo

We don’t have to look far to see why Filipinos are having a serious problem learning their Filipino and their English. Taglish, the popular pidgin of Filipino, English, and Spanish, has been the language of choice of the major TV and radio networks for several years now. With this choice, and without meaning to, the Philippine broadcast media have become the most influential but the worst language teachers of the Filipino people. Through their indiscriminate use of Taglish, they have actually been promoting a language that runs roughshod over the form, grammar, and pronunciation of both Filipino and English. They not only hamper and negate the efforts of Filipino-language or English-language teachers in the country, but also undo the progress of even the most capable learners. The major broadcast networks have, in fact, unwittingly made Taglish the default language of the Filipino, there to be heard and seen even without the asking. It should really be no surprise why many language teachers cannot even get their own Filipino and English grammars and pronunciation right, much less teach their pupils and students good Filipino and English.

        IMAGE CREDIT: DWIZ DIGITAL*

It is a terribly lopsided language war in favor of Taglish. When we wake up in the morning, even if we didn’t want to listen, what do we hear from the leading TV and radio networks? Not music to inspire, nor instruction to learn a new thing or two, nor entertainment to start the day right. Instead we get bad news, shallow opinion, and malicious gossip, merrily delivered in Taglish—a Taglish that is getting looser, more audacious, and more pedestrian as the networks fiercely wage their audience-ratings war. Daily we are treated to a sordid spectacle of talk show hosts trying to outshine one another in their off-the-cuff Taglish, flexing the morning news whichever way they wish, and further adding to the Babel by coaxing viewers or listeners to chip in with their own uninformed opinions. 

And this penchant to get uninformed opinion goes to ludicrous extremes: in one network, a gaudily dressed female correspondent chatters nonstop in particularly crude Taglish, runs wild along city streets, clambers up jeepneys, and sashays into wet markets, thrusting microphone onto the mouths of unwitting respondents and forcing them to blurt nonsense on-camera. But not to be outdone, one network features a regular gossip portion hosted by two gays who use pure swardspeak—a breezy, outlandish Taglish—to smear and skewer unnamed movie and TV personalities, government officials, and anybody who takes their fancy. These are, of course, only for the morning wakeuppers. More atrocious Taglish are to come in the TV networks’ noontime variety shows and evening sitcoms.

No amount of formal Filipino and English teaching or linguistic engineering can counter this relentless onslaught on the Filipino’s ears, eyes, tongue, and psyche. Taglish, a language that requires little intellection, offers the line of least resistance to the people. It is all too pat and easy; you can get away with bad thinking and bad grammar and still look intelligent. So why choose the harder road to learning the formal structures and grammar of good Filipino and good English? But give five to ten more years of this Taglish pummeling, and we probably will have a whole new generation of Filipinos totally incapable of speaking and writing in correct Filipino and correct English.

Can we do something about the situation? 

Two countries similarly confronted by the growth of pidgin in their society are fighting it with the language gatekeeping approach. To protect Icelandic from the inroads of English, the government of Iceland has created the Icelandic Language Institute to “immunize” Icelandic from English by coining new native words for English ones. The Singapore government has launched a “Speak Good English Movement” to curb Singlish, its own Pidgin of English, Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin. In a country like the Philippines, however, admirable bureaucratic efforts like these will probably take too long to take off and get things done. The Taglish problem probably needs a more frontal approach.

The general public and the government can take the first crucial step by impressing on the major TV and networks that their role is not simply to mirror society with all its quirks, foibles, and predispositions and to take undue advantage of these in their programming. It also has the obligation to provide their audiences with enough shows and role models for what is good and desirable for the country and its people. They must be made keenly aware that their “mirroring society” model, along with the much-vaunted media freedoms, cannot forever justify the unbridled use of Taglish and “infotainment,” which is often a simplistic, misleading mix of news and uninformed opinion masquerading as public service. In short, the broadcast media, as a social institution strongly imbued with public interest, should serve not only their mercantile interests but the public interest as well—like using good Filipino and good English instead of Taglish for starters.

This essay first appeared in Jose A. Carillo's "English Plain and Simple" column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed Chapter 14 of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Way To Learn Today's Global Language, ©2004 by Jose A.Carillo, ©2008 and Third Updated Edition ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*PAGGAMIT NG TAGLISH NA SALITA, TINUTULAN NG KWF 
by DWIZ 882     September 3, 2022

Tutol ang Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF) sa paggamit ng publiko ng Taglish o yung pinagsamang Tagalog at English. Ayon kay Arthur Casanova, Chairman ng KWF, ibang lebel na ang paggamit ng TagLish dahil nasisira nito ang istruktura ng dalawang wika. Nilinaw naman ni Casanova na hindi niya sinasabing huwag gumamit ng English, pero gusto lamang niyang bigyang-diin ang pagpapahalaga sa Wikang Pambansa.

RETROSPECTIVE TO AN ESSAY WRITTEN IN THE EARLY 2000s

Tales of perdition and destruction
BY JOSE A. CARILLO

Our country’s politically disturbing situation today has impelled me to hark back to this cautionary essay that I wrote in the early 2000s bewailing our tendency as a people “to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but terribly bad decisions that make life so miserable for many of us.”

IN THE engineering discipline there’s this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures—bridges and buildings, for instance—savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety’s sake, they have models of the structures “tested to destruction.”

The closest popular expression of this that I can think of is the English idiomatic expression “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” The allusion is, of course, not only to the danger of overloading beasts of burden but also to the perils of blind, unconditional trust in the capacity of things and people to perform beyond their natural, God-given limits. The folly of such behavior is captured chillingly in this haunting English lullaby familiar to most of us:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle, and all.

       IMAGE CREDITS: (LEFT) FLORENCE MARY ANDERSON, PINTEREST.COM,       (RIGHT) PINTEREST.COM)

That humorous English poet-mathematical logician Lewis Carroll (1832-1868) also captured this logic of destruction in the following rhyme about the fallen Humpty Dumpty’s fate in his parable Alice in Wonderland:

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Literature and history are, in fact, replete with accounts of tragedies resulting from a failure to recognize the limits to the strength of materials. For instance, in the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by the American playwright-novelist Thornton Wilder ((1897-1975), five apparently morally faultless people on religious pilgrimage plunge to their death when a suspension bridge over a deep canyon snaps. Afterwards, a cleric investigates if there was anything bad or evil the victims had done in their lives for them to deserve such apparently senseless deaths.

Little attention was given to the state of the bridging materials and to their possible deterioration over time, nor to the possibility that the victims might have been, say, excessively overweight, that they may have clustered too close to one another at a weak spot, or that they might have gone into such religious frenzies—as in the Mardi Gras or our very own Ati-Atihan—for the bridge to snap in sympathetic vibration. Any of these circumstances might have been “the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” so to speak.

A parallel incident with similar religious overtones happened in Naga City in the Philippines way back in September of 1972. Right after a fluvial procession in honor of the Bicol Region’s religious patroness, Our Lady of Peñafrancia, had passed underneath an old wooden bridge over the Bicol River, the bridge collapsed. Several dozen devotees and onlookers, most of them boys and girls, were crushed to death or drowned.

To my knowledge, no religious investigation was done to connect their tragic fate to possible moral or reprehensible misdeeds in their life, as was done by the cleric who investigated “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” tragedy. However, just a few hours after the Bicol River bridge collapsed, I personally went to the scene and this was what I saw—the wooden rafters and railings were severely rotted, split, or cracked after years of exposure to sun, wind, rain, and termites. To my mind, there was no way the badly decayed wood could have held the weight of those hundreds of people jostling one another in religious frenzy on the bridge or hanging from its rafters. The faith of the devotees was incredibly strong, but the materials of the bridge simply had become so weak for carry their mortal weight.

In shipping as well, even the “battleship quality” steel of the ocean liner RMS Titanic fractured and broke that fateful night on April 14, 1912 when the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing over 1,500 passengers aboard. The ship’s hull, although made of what was touted as the best plain carbon ship-plate material available during the time, was damaged by the iceberg, and the rivet heads in the areas of contact simply popped off because of the tremendous forces created by the collision. This caused several seams in the hull to open up, flooding the ship’s watertight compartments. Because of their ductility, the rivets normally should have deformed first before failing, but according to some strength of materials analysts who examined materials from the wreckage many years later, they must have become so brittle in below-freezing water temperature. Their safety factor was thus breached and they failed.

           IMAGE CREDIT: ELITEREADERS.COM

As in these tales of perdition and destruction, the danger to all of us inthe Philippes is that we have been so mercilessly conditioned by our contemporary culture, religion, and media to believe that everything is possible. We hardly put any safety factor in our personal, social, and political affairs. We thrive and even revel in blind faith and wishful thinking. We observe no minimum nor maximum measures, no standards, no limits to anything—be it a dream, a plan, a product, a support system, a mode of conveyance, an advocacy, or a vote or aspiration to an elective post. In sum, we don’t think logically and rationally. We consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.

This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 151 in my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.