I've often wondered how and when upper-class school-aged Filipinos starting becoming more fluent in English than in our native language. I recall all those "English campaigns" in school where you'd be fined for speaking a word of Tagalog, and everyone was either shutting up or uttering English words interspersed with "ano" and "kwan" and "you knows". If you spoke English with a twang, people would look at you funny and think you're mayabang. Although we ourselves grew up watching American cartoons, game shows and TV series, and we have tape recordings of our parents speaking to us in English, Tagalog was still our default language. It still is for me and my wife Amity.
The funny thing is, my kids do not speak Tagalog at all. Well, actually, if you look at their grades in the Filipino subject and you try to review them for exams, it becomes sooo NOT funny. When I go to their school -- my alma mater -- the kids, from high schoolers down, speak English with a twang. Amity and I were talking about it and we attribute it to Cable TV. Digging further, we realized that our kids' being Tagalog-challenged is actually our fault. Before they were born, we made a conscious decision to speak to our children in English to "train" them. Even their aunts and uncles adjusted to them. We made them watch only Barney, Dora and Diego, Disney Junior and Cartoon Network on Cable. And we did not let them play out in our streets, lest they start speaking the PI's they'd hear from the grownups (and a lot of kids) in our neighborhood. We the parents adjusted to our kids, and we know that we are bending over backwards because during heated scolding episodes, we find ourselves stumbling over our English, when the emotions would flow out more freely in Tagalog. I know that we are not alone, as we hear it from our co-parents. I see parents complaining on the FB thread about the school making Filipino too difficult for the poor children. The irony is that their Filipino subject-bashing threads are all in English -- although not everyone has impeccable spelling and grammar -- when nobody is forcing them to do so. And they wonder why their kids don't speak the language. I'll bet they also speak to (and scold) the kids in English, and make them watch only English cable channels -- perhaps even tell the yaya to talk to the child only in English.
And so we've resolved to make weekends "Filipino days", where Amity and I try to resist the unnatural urge to speak to the kids in English, and to force the kids to repeat what they are trying to say in Filipino. So far, not so good. But it's a start.
p.s.
By some strange coincidence, my prior post was a little over a year ago, and it was about starting to write in my blog all over again, for the 2nd time. Let's hope 3rd time's a charm.
