Here I am at Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport on my way home from a 2 week sojourn in Philippines (or Pilipinas as thy call it here). Before departing for this trip I had studied Tagalog (aka Filipino) for about a month, and as usual learning the basics of the language made for a richer, more heart-warming stay because I could have more rapport with the locals and connect with them on a deeper level.
The excited smiles and enthusiastic reactions to my simple Tagalog, and the wild laughter I heard in response to my embarrassingly bad Tagalog puns still reverberate inside my memory. It was, however, a little bizarre trying to use Tagalog in the Philippines, for a few reasons.
Fighting to Speak Tagalog in Manila
In general most Filipinos speak English well, especially in the Metro Manila area. This means that you rarely HAVE TO speak Tagalog, which makes it psychologically more of a challenge to shift into “Tagalog mode”. On the rare occasions when I met someone who spoke very little English, it was fairly easy to shift into Tagalog mode and express myself with much less hesitation. I know this is partly because the imbalance in abilities. When two people share two languages in common, they normally default to the one that best aids in communication, so if my Tagalog is very basic, it will only become our default language if your English is more basic than my Tagalog. To violate that natural default causes awkwardness and a feeling that you are using the other person as a tool to practice. Some people are oblivious to this, and they usually end up alienating some people. For me, being conscious of this caused some hesitation to speak Tagalog.
Along with my own hesitation to violate that natural default was the native Tagalog speaker`s tendency to reply to me in English. They would love the fact that I spoke in Tagalog and would grin ear to ear, but would express their appreciation in English. I don`t think this was an attempt to shut down my Tagalog, but more of a desire to keep the communication going smoothly. The result was that most conversations were mostly in English but puncuated with Tagalog, used kind of as a spice that created good emotions. None of this was really unexpected, and mirrors my experiences trying to speak other languages with natives in the early stages of learning.
Using Tagalog in the Visaya Region
The more unexpected experiences took place outside of Manila with non-native Tagalog speakers. I spent 5 days on the island of Negros Oriental, in the Visaya region where the native language is Bisaya (or Cebuano), not Tagalog. In this region, people learn Tagalog as a second language in school and through the media, and learn English as a third language. So I find the level of English is generally quite a bit lower in this region, and English is not so quick to become the default language. But neither is Tagalog! I had more opportunities to speak Tagalog in this region, but the locals often answered me in Bisaya – accompanied by a smartass giggle that showed they were messing with me. They would typically answer at full native speed in Bisaya, laugh, and then when I couldn`t fully understand they would switch to Tagalog, but then pronounce it very slowly and deliberately like they were talking to a baby. It was all funny and friendly, but the message seemed to be “Sure, we can help you by speaking Tagalog, but we really prefer speaking Bisaya.”
Native speakers of Bisaya seem somewhat resentful about having to learn Tagalog, since Bisaya has as many native speakers as Tagalog or even more by some counts. I was reading a scholarly paper on the differences between Tagalog and Bisaya written during the American colonial period, in which the writer states that Tagalog speakers are “more civilized” than Bisaya speakers (take that with a colonial grain of salt). Basically, Tagalog was chosen as the national language because it was the language of the economic elite in Manila, while the Visayas were considered a provincial backwater. So there is a little bit of an attitude of “Screw those Manila showoffs and their language”. Everybody understands Tagalog in the Visayas, but that doesn`t mean they speak it really well or have made much effort to do so.
Tagalog vs Bisaya
The result is that I got to practice more Tagalog in the Visaya region, and since it`s not their native language they tended to speak in a way that was easier for me to understand. But I also picked up some basic Bisaya phrases as well, because I could see that it makes the locals very happy. From the Bisaya that I learned, and the resources I looked at a little bit, it looks like Tagalog and Bisaya are really not that linguistically different – but a very large proportion of the vocabulary is different. The phonology, morphology, and grammar are very similar, and lots of words are the same or similar – but maybe not the majority of words. It seems easy to learn one if you already know the other, and if I was planning on staying long term in the Visaya region, then Bisaya would definitely be the more useful language to focus on.
For now I`m going to keep studying Tagalog, because I love the Philippines as a whole and I have no idea where I`ll end up next time. It might be another part of the Visayas, it might be an Ilocano-speaking area, it might be a Bikolano-speaking area, who knows. Since I`m not focusing on a certain region, I`ll keep learning the national lingua franca – even though the locals may not be thrilled to speak it. But I`ll have some fun learning a bit of the local regional language wherever I go.
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