English Use Among Kids
Hi everyone,
I'm in the Philippines right now for work. I'll be staying for a few months, and it's a wonderful country.
I have a question. I've noticed that a lot of kids speak English with each other instead of Tagalog. It's not just when they talk to me, but even when they're by themselves.
I looked it up on Google, and a lot of Filipino users online say that even though they were born and raised in the Philippines, they can't speak Tagalog.
Is this common?
I'm from Europe, and this really shocks me. My country is very small, but I can't imagine not using our language with our kids and not passing it on to them. Keeping our language alive and using it every day is a matter of national pride for us.
The Philippines was colonized for much longer than my country, so it's honestly amazing that it managed to preserve its languages through all those years.
But are kids really not using them anymore? Does nobody care? Is the Philippines going to become the first fully English-speaking country in Southeast Asia?
Do politicians even talk about this?
Many of the kids who speak English seem to come from wealthy families and private schools in big cities like Manila, while many replies say that in rural areas and the provinces, kids still speak the local language. The causes people pointed to were screen time with English videos and parents who see English as a way to get ahead in life. There were also stories from people who picked Tagalog back up as they grew older.
It's because young kids get a lot of screen time, mostly watching English-language shows. These days, once they go to school, they start using Tagalog more and more.
Kids still use the local languages (not just Tagalog), especially in the countryside. And in cities too. It's just that English media is so easy to access that kids pick up English. But don't worry. Once they start hanging out with kids who speak the local language, and the parents give up on stringing together English sentences to answer their children, they end up learning the local language. I was a pure Filipino kid who grew up with English first, and by going to school with people who spoke those languages, I eventually picked up Tagalog and two Bicol dialects. That's how I know. Another thing is that many Filipinos from modest backgrounds treat being good at English as a status symbol. Even if luck isn't on their side, they want to say their kid is 'refined' enough to speak English. Ironically, if you speak Tagalog or another local language fluently, people do see that as 'refined' too, but in the way of a poet or novelist. It's like mixing Victorian or Shakespearean English into ordinary English conversation. I wish the latter became trendy. I'm for enriching Philippine languages with new terms.
If you're in a major metropolitan area in the Philippines, there will be more English-speaking kids. If you go out to the countryside, they use Tagalog or the local languages and dialects far more often. I think the wealthier the neighborhood and the more private schools there are, the more common English speakers become.
Politicians don't talk about this. If anything, the upper class (politicians included) are the ones who caused this shift. You need English to get a job. In school, most subjects are taught in English. Some private schools even ban the use of local languages entirely. Most of the writing in the country is in English too. Proper newspapers are in English, and the local languages are only for trashy tabloids. The local languages haven't been developed into intellectual languages and are stuck with shallow topics, and I think that affects the quality of public discourse too. As someone who loves language, culture, and history, seeing this breaks my heart. We treat our heritage as inferior, slowly kill it, and then demand loyalty to this country. It's absurd.
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