HE national language of the Philippines is Filipino, according to the 1987 Constitution. When one hears Filipino being spoken, however, it sounds almost exactly like Tagalog. In fact, one may possibly wonder what is being heard: Is it Filipino? Or is it Tagalog? When the Spanish came to colonize the Philippines, there existed no language named “Filipino.” In the first report given to then-US president William McKinley by the First Philippine Commission to describe the situation in the new colony at the beginning of the 20th century, 84 tribes were listed as existing in the country, and the following have the highest numbers: Visayans (2,601,600), Tagalogs (1,663,900), Bicols (518,800), Ilocanos (441,700), Pangasinans (365,500), Pampangas (337,900). It seems to me these corresponded to the ethnolinguistic groupings in the Philippines, with the label “Visayans” possibly including Cebuano and the other Visayan languages. It was President Manuel Quezon, as he was preparing the country for independence, who came up with the idea of a national language in 1936 and set up the National Language Institute (NLI) to “make a study of the Philippine dialects in general for the purpose of evolving and adopting a common national language based on one of the existing native tongues.” The institute eventually recommended Tagalog as the basis of the Philippine national language by the following year, and President Quezon endorsed Tagalog as such.

Expectedly, this was not wellreceived by non-Tagalogs, and a court case was in fact filed alleging the NLI’s deception when it renamed the national language as “Pilipino” when it is in fact Tagalog all the same. What ensued is what has been called the period of “national language wars” in the Philippines. And so the 1973 Constitution ordered, “(2) The Batasang Pambansa shall take steps toward the development and formal adoption of a common national language to be known as Filipino. (3) Until otherwise provided by law, English and Pilipino shall be the official languages.” Notice that Filipino was referred to as being developed in (2) while Pilipino was already existing in (3). It could be interpreted that Filipino and Pilipino are two different languages, based on the 1973 Constitution. The tumultuous years leading to the 1987 Constitution and the clamor for national unity probably led the people not to question the stipulation of Filipino as the national language in the Constitution. The Constitution also assumes the language has reached the level of development desired in previous Constitutions because, in 1987, it was simply stated that it “shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.” I emphasize “further developed” and I read it to mean that there is already a desirable point of development achieved at that moment in time.

Yet the non-resistance of nonTagalogs toward “Filipino” as the national language does not necessarily solve the mystery. Giving a name to something does not necessarily mean it exists in real life. What exactly is the national language? Is it not simply Tagalog? When one asks a Filipino what Filipino (the language) is, one will likely get this answer, as has been preached by several Constitutions: “It is a mixture of [all] languages in the Philippines.” But that is just not true. That is not theoretically possible. I have not heard anyone in the Philippines speak a language that is a mixture of (all) languages in the Philippines. This conscious mixing of new words in Tagalog, or Filipino, is seen in the recent popularity of the word “padayon,” which, I think is an attempt to replace the English “congratulations” or the Tagalog “pagbati.” Padayon is borrowed from Visayas to mean “continue,” and its current popular usage, “continue excelling.”

In actual usage, what most Filipinos will call “Filipino” is the cosmopolitan variety of Tagalog, a language with Tagalog as its grammatical backbone with some word-level borrowings from English, Spanish and other Philippine languages. This is very much consistent with Bro. Andrew Gonzalez and Prof. Wilfrido Alberca’s summation of what Filipino is as the national language, following their analysis of the provisions and transcripts of the assembly of the 1987 Constitution: “Filipino is based on Tagalog (already enriched with loanwords from Arabic and Sanskrit and Kapampangan) and enriched with loanwords from Spanish and English; it was renamed Pilipino in 1959 by the Secretary of Education (Jose Romero); it is being further enriched by loanwords from Philippine and other languages. Lexically, therefore, like other modern languages (for example, English), Filipino is multi-based and is a language mixture; its grammatical base and therefore structures are still Tagalog, however. The possibility is that as these structures evolve, from the influences of other Philippine languages, further modifications of grammatical morphemes through borrowing may enter the language and may lead to grammatical restructuring or at least the modification of subsystems within the system (for example, verb inflection and derivation).” From a typological linguistic perspective, Filipino and Tagalog might likely fail the tests of mutual intelligibility and other quantitative techniques in measuring structural distance between languages and that is simply because their lexicon and grammar are exactly the same. From a historical linguistic perspective though, all languages borrow words from other languages as a mechanism of change. But it appears, given the definition of Filipino, when Tagalog borrows, it is no longer Tagalog but Filipino. But that therefore imprisons Tagalog and takes away from it all its right to borrow words from other languages because, when it does, it is no longer that language called “Tagalog” but will be “Filipino.” The hope is that, in the future, Filipino will develop into a language with an identity of its own, not one dominated by Tagalog features.

Bro. Andrew Gonzalez, as early as 1974, already said the idea of Filipino is but a legal fiction, arrived at as a compromise acceptable to the different ethnolinguistic groups in the country, and that “Filipino” was a term with a sense but without a reference. My wish for the Philippines is that it will not be under the shadow of what might be a purely imaginary national language, which no one really speaks and no one really knows what exactly it is.