Baylon, Melvie Mar R.

2008-44523

Tagalog…English…………Taglish

With the invention of the Taglish rose a language of convenience that seems to fill the

gap. What gap?

The Philippine educational system let students learn both Filipino and English. The case

is a lot of the students’ first language is Filipino/Tagalog or any other native languages.

Philippine languages are believed and proven by researches that they have similarities in

grammatical structures and pronunciations. Filipino/Tagalog and other native languages

apparently differ from grammatical and phonetic structures of English. Grammatical

constructions are one of the problems of learning the language, second to it is some confusing

pronunciations. With this I can say that an Ilocano speaker or a person with any Philippine

language as first language will have a better convenience of learning Filipino/Tagalog than

English. The difficulty of learning English, for some generations of students in the Philippines,

encouraged the patronage for Taglish.

As language of convenience, it means that it is easy to use. In informal speech, as I have

observed in the couple of years using Taglish, sentences are freely and spontaneously

constructed. There may be questions like, “If they are mixture of two languages which grammar

should we use?” but this are overlooked by actual speakers. As a language of convenience in

invokes ease in communication which Taglish fosters.

I’ve been saying that there is a difficulty in learning English and this somewhat made

ESL learners to resort to Taglish. It’s another case for first language users of English. There are

people I know whose L1 is English but successfully uses Taglish in their daily informal

conversation. So it can be logically stated that there are two apparent ways wherein we enter the

realm of Taglish: L1—non-English to L2—English and L1—English to L2— non-English.

Nowadays, having a knowledge of Filipino/Tagalog and English somewhat inevitably

position us to the potential or actual use of Taglish. This probability is perpetuated by what I

would to call as Taglish Diaspora Through Media. It doesn’t seem clear if the media was

influence by an overwhelming number of Taglish speakers or it was it which started its growth.

Taglish has been the language of the media in the Philippines. Almost all of every

imaginable channel of information has been dominated by the language, from television, to

tabloids, to radios, to the internet, etc. Every now that we tune in to ABS-CBN or GMA, the two

major television networks industries in the Philippines, we are welcomed and we are entertained

by using Taglish as medium of relation.

The Filipino people have embraced the usage of language that it had been the

conventional way of speaking; not straight Filipino and not straight English. Straight Filipino

invokes, for the young of this generation, a sense of deepness while straight English, a sense of

authority or high class. The former and the latter statements both defer what is an ideal situation

of communication. An ideal communication is supposed to be a smooth channeling of

exchanging ideas between communicators. Now with the two statements it seems that we have

planted hurdles of different heights that every time we relate to our co-communicator we always

first weigh what will be the effect of our speech. Of course this is sometimes inevitable for

example in serious talks like business matters and academic. But, what if it is friendly talks?

Given that three people knows both English and Tagalog, and intentionally chooses to speak in

three different ways, namely English, Tagalog and Taglish. It is true that they will understand

each other but their uses of language is not accommodating that they don’t foster an ideal

situation of communication.

In its peak of functionality as a language, there are still that contest the existence of the

language. Anti-Taglish individuals or groups say that it is a bastardization of both

Filipino/Tagalog and English. What they are saying then is that Filipino/Tagalog and English are

not bastardized form of languages, but in terms of bastardization that is an act of deviating from

the normal and creating a new functional language, which is what also they are positing, both of

these languages are also bastardized. We can say that Filipino is a bastardized form of Spanish

and the contemporary English, of Old English. I said earlier that Taglish has been embraced by

the mass. Language as a matter of fact is conventional. It follows what is accepted by the

majority of the mass. With this thinking there is no reason for a minority voice to impose that

Taglish is a bastardization—that it is wrong.

Ironically, the language is considered as unscholarly but there are emerging or existing

works of scholars that adopted Taglish not only as a focus of their works or medium of it, but

also they adopted it as a way a speech.

There have not been official codifications of the language, but is there a need of it now? I

mean take a look around. This language is everywhere. It is more of a national language than

Filipino is. It continues to be used and perpetuated. As they say that a language is not of what is

recorded and standardized of it but its usage by the people who speak it, Taglish continues to

exist by our tongues and not on slates.