A Window To Our Past

Since the American colonial era, the Spanish language had been on a steady decline in the

Philippines. As early as in the 1920s, there was already a notable decrease in the usage of the Spanish language which even led to the creation of the Premio Zobel. Established to promote the Spanish language, Premio Zobel was a literary award given to Filipino writers who wrote in the Spanish language.

Today, while the Spanish language no longer plays a vital role in our country, it remains to be

alive in the form of words found in our local languages that have its roots in that language.

Words in the Filipino language such as pero (but), oras (hours), mesa (table), radyo (radio),

libro (book), sapatos (shoes), baka (cow/beef), kalye (street) and many others make it

impossible for Filipinos to go through the day without uttering a single word in Spanish. In

Zamboanga city, the importance of the Spanish language in our culture can be appreciated

even more as the people there speak a Spanish creole language called Chabacano.

When I was fifteen years old I decided that I wanted to learn a foreign language. I told myself

that since Chabacano was my mother tongue, it would probably be easier to learn Spanish. I

was very enamored with the Spanish language that I even wrote Malacaňang to bring back

the Spanish subject in Philippine schools. My father tried to dissuade me saying that it was

one of the most hated subjects of Filipinos when it was still a requirement to study it in

schools.

Why did the Filipinos dislike the Spanish subject so much when it used to be taught in

schools? Maybe it had something to do with how the Spaniards were portrayed in our history

books. I'm not sure if things have changed but when I was younger, I recall developing ill

feelings towards the Spaniards because of the things that I read in our history books at school.

Television shows such as Bayani also instilled in my mind the idea that the Spaniards were

evil. As I grew older however, and was exposed to the internet, I realized that some of the

things that were written in our history books were black propaganda. The university where I

studied at was also kinder in painting a picture of the Spanish era that my impressionable

mind almost thought that the colonizers were angels.

Growing up, one of the things that have always puzzled me was whether we spoke Spanish at

some point in the past. Was there ever a time in our history when Spanish was our lingua

franca? As far as my elementary school history teachers were concerned, we were never

taught to speak Spanish because our colonizers did not want us to. However, as I explored

this topic more thoroughly, I realized that there are numerous glaring evidences that say

otherwise. For example, did you know that when the American government published a

pamphlet in 1916 about the Jones law, it was written in Spanish? How about the declaration

of independence written in Malolos in 1898? Do you know that it was written in Spanish?

And did you know that the hymn that we know of today as our national anthem was

originally written in Spanish and only later translated into Filipino? Even the patriotic song

Ang bayan kong Pilipinas was originally written in Spanish and unbeknownst to many, it is a

song written against the American occupation of the Philippines. Yes, the dayuhan being

referred to in the song were the Americans and not the Spaniards.

Jose Rizal's novels were all written in Spanish. I remember being told in school that the

reason why Jose Rizal wrote in Spanish was because he wanted his works to be understood

by the Spaniards. But couldn't the simpler answer be that he wrote in Spanish because

Spanish was the equivalent of what English is to us today? Perhaps we did speak Spanish but

with varying degrees of fluency. Today, not everybody can speak English in the Philippines

and yet we all say that we are an English-speaking country. So maybe Spanish was in the past simply what English is for us today, a foreign language that some can speak quite well and most (if not everyone) can understand.

So does the possibility that Spanish used to be spoken in our country even if it was only after

a fashion enough reason to require our students to study Spanish in schools once more?

Recently, there has been a government initiative to teach it again in public high schools

(along with other foreign languages). A Spanish teacher I met a few months ago however,

lamented the fact that although Spanish is now offered as an elective subject in some

Philippine schools, some students prefer to study other languages such as Korean. When I

was growing up, Mexican telenovelas were all the rage and perhaps that contributed to my

interest in the language as well. Today, Korean boy bands and soap operas dominate our lives

and perhaps this has led to a decline in fashionability of the Spanish language in the

Philippines. If we had a more robust economic relationship with Spanish-speaking countries,

maybe more Filipino students would prefer to study Spanish over Korean. Today, the ability

to speak Spanish has little to no economic advantage in our country and if at all is contained in industries such as the contact center industry. Of course, there are predictions that the Spanish language shall be the most spoken language in the United States by 2050 but this too is not really a significant incentive to study it given the waning importance of that country in the global arena today.

Things could have been worse, though. We could've changed the name of the country in a bid to erase our colonial past just like what our neighbors did. It is important that we acknowledge the past but acknowledging the past does not mean that we should all live in a

bahay na bato but rather it only means that we should not be tearing them down. As Jose

Rizal famously said: Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa

kanyang paroroonan. I personally don't believe that we need to bring back the Spanish language to its former status in our country. The Spanish language in my opinion is only as

important as the bahay na bato, it is a link to our past and it gives us a glimpse of who we

were as a people.

This article was also published in Revista Filipina.