IN the context of a study tour on multilingualism and mobility I organized as a course for undergraduate and doctoral students at my university, I had the opportunity to visit Los Angeles on the West Coast of the United States for roughly two weeks in early September. It is not only one of the biggest metropolitan areas in California or the United States; it is in fact economically the third in the world, after New York and Tokyo. Such a global status makes it a top destination for migrants from many parts of the world, but especially for Filipinos. With more than 600,000 Filipinos living in its metropolitan area, Los Angeles actually has the largest Filipino population outside of the Philippines.

As my students were taking notes on migration and international migrants broadly, I was keen on looking closely at Filipinos and Philippine languages in Los Angeles. At first sight, unlike in other global cities home to many Filipinos, too, such as London, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong, Filipinos in Los Angeles blend into the population more than in the aforementioned cities. There were also many Mexicans in Los Angeles, owing to its close proximity to Mexico and also its history, which was formerly under Mexican rule in the early 1800s. Filipinos and Mexicans share many cultural similarities, and even skin color, I must say!

Linguistically speaking, Filipinos speak English. I do not wish to deny the fact that there are indeed Filipinos in Los Angeles who are not fluent in English, but they are very, very few and far in between, and they are usually the older generation migrants. The language of Filipinos in Los Angeles is English/Tagalog. Therefore, in the Filipino diaspora in Los Angeles, language policy and planning have thus been successful in making the Filipino language one of the identifying characteristics of being Filipino. But because English is the dominant language in Los Angeles and Filipinos do speak English quite well and quite often, hearing Filipino and also other Philippine languages has not been too common. Filipinos in Los Angeles may sometimes choose to use English rather than Filipino, probably prodded by their linguistic environment and landscape. I in particular wish to note that while there were Ukrainian and Japanese Masses celebrated in the Ukrainian and Japanese Catholic parishes of Los Angeles, there were not any in Filipino/Tagalog, much less in other Philippine languages. This seems to be the case in many other cities around the world where Masses are celebrated in other migrant languages but not Philippine languages. And this is, I say, because English is very much associated with the Philippines and Filipinos, and most parishes think Filipinos could conveniently attend the international English Masses and would not need a separate Philippine language Mass.

I met a few Filipino friends in Los Angeles who are all now naturalized Americans, and they seem to very well represent the medley of Filipino migrants in Los Angeles. Adrian Aladin, actually a nephew of prominent Filipino linguist Dr. Shirley Dita, moved to the United States in his pre-teen years, is obviously American-accented in his English, and seems more at home with English than with other languages. I also met the very kind and generous Miguel Pingul, actually a friend of a very good friend Rhocell Sosa. He moved to the United States after college. He is a proud Kapampangan, not only linguistically but culinarily. I wish my students and I were able to taste his mastery of Kapampangan cuisine, which he said he would have done if given the time and chance. He, together with his parents and grandparents, still speak Kapampangan alongside English. And finally, my college classmate and good friend, Kathleen Ann Ronquillo, who married Alex Ronquillo. Kathy moved to the United States only after our graduate school years, but I remember Kathy being Englishspeaking even when we were in college, and I am not surprised her cute daughter Matilda speaks English more than Tagalog. Kathy is now teaching English to international students and migrants in Los Angeles. My dear Los Angeles friends are only a few of the migrant language stories in Los Angeles that tell of how Filipinos and Philippine languages exist in diasporic contexts. I want to also take this opportunity to thank them for their generosity and kindness, not only to me but also to my students during our visit to Los Angeles.

Our official host in Los Angeles is Dr. Nenita Pambid Domingo, a member of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She has been lecturing on the Filipino language at the university for more than 20 years now. She has also written textbooks on Filipino/Tagalog as a foreign language. Thanks to her, we could visit Los Angeles and UCLA and she also gave lectures to my students and toured us in the historic Filipino town. People like her keep the Filipino language and heritage alive not only among Filipinos in Los Angeles but also among interested students of the Filipino language. She is doing important work to preserve Filipino as a heritage language in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is a great place to witness the Filipino diaspora and Philippine languages in diasporic contexts as well. I am delighted to be involved in a pioneering work on Philippine languages in diasporic contexts together with Kristine de Leon, Kenichiro Kurusu, Maria Hannah Martin and Philip Rentillo. More (Filipino) linguists should be interested in investigating and documenting Philippine languages in diasporic contexts such as this one in Los Angeles. There are more cities in the world that have large Filipino populations, and they deserve (scholarly) attention, too.

Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is one of the leading scholars on English in the Philippines and is also doing pioneering work on language in the context of migration. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics at age 23 from De La Salle University and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore and Taiwan. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan.