National Language: Tagalog Or Bisaya

[FreeSpirit]

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Ok i dont know where ethnologue got their data but according to NSO census year 2000 which is the latest data we have versus the ethnologue data 1995

http://www.census.gov.ph/data/pressr...pr02178tx.html



Tagalog: 21,485,927
Cebuano: 10,030,667 + Bisaya/Binisaya: 5,778,435 = 15,809,102

Tagalog: 21,485,927
Cebuano incl. Bisaya/Binisaya: 15,809,102

[FreeSpirit]

Now I dont know, but I think the NSO data is more accurate. Filipino based on Tagalog should still be the national language. According to NSO

http://www.census.gov.ph/data/sectordata/sr05153tx.html

"Nine out of ten can speak Tagalog

Almost all of the household population who were able to attend school can speak Tagalog (96.4 percent). Females (96.49 percent) had a little advantage over the males (96.37 percent).

As expected, almost all of the residents in NCR (99.08 percent), Southern Tagalog (98.71 percent), and Central Luzon (98.57 percent) can speak Tagalog while the lowest was in ARMM (74.55 percent) and Western Mindanao (77.76 percent)"

[Princess_Fiona]

BISAYA! Love your own dialect cebuanos! hehehe..i know i'm being biased but I really love to hear all Tagalogs learning how to speak Bisaya rather than the other way around.

[monrose29]

heheheh bisaya gyud ka bisaya gud ko....

[glenn]

I guess it doesn't take a long debate to that....coz tagalog has been in our culture since the time that we are called filipinos.............now if we are going to change the cultural data, ano yan charter change?.............it has been in our history to used tagalog as our national language, and it is correct where ever you go if your not familiar with the dialect that they are using you can communicate them thru tagalog...........especially in Mindanao.........and if we are to used english as our national language, actually english has different viariations too like the english french or the english british and the american english, mura pud na og sa ato mga bisaya kay sa Davao ang bisaya malanguy paman ang diri sa Cebu pirti jud kalalum. Sama sa bas nga dapat balas ang pagka pronounced sa Davao ang bas kay bus nga sakyanan ang pagsabot ana, karsones sa Davao pantalon na siya, kutaw nga pirti ka lalum sa Davao timpla na siya...........so we cannot run to what we called unity interms of dialouge..................even in cebuano dialouge.............

[FreeSpirit]

I agree

[K]

I would tend to believe the accuracy of a scholarly, internationally recognized, disinterested 3rd party rather than the statistics department of a government badly in need of credibility. I would think that a 3rd party is more reliable since the people in control of the government would want to preserve or justify the imposition of tagalog as national language.

It is not easy to trust the government. Case in point: it seems that even the history taught to us is biased towards equating being Filipino to speaking tagalog. If I may quote glenn, " tagalog has been in our culture since the time that we are called filipinos." This is simply erroneous. Tagalog has been with Manila culture since the time we were called Filipinos and way before that. But outside of the Tagalog speaking areas, during the inception of the Philippine nation, being Filipino HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH TAGALOG.

The national language was set-up in 1937 and it took decades before it was implemented. Yet in 1899, Gen. Maxilom of Cebu said to the Cebuano people:

The hour has already sounded when the Mother Country, in the midst of her tortures and countless sufferings, calls to us, Cebuanos, with a sorrowful and pleading voice, so that we, her sons, may without hesitation or dismay, raise the war cry thoughout the fields... Independence or death--this is our theme... Let us fight then without hesitation or dismay, because God is in us, and His power is great, and however powerful the American nation may be, He can overthrow its power, destroying it as He did the giant Goliath, by the hand of the boy, David, with no weapon but a sling.

Let us fight, I repeat, and trust in God, the God of armies, who is watching over us.
(Mojares, Resil: War Against the Americans, p. 46)

This means non-tagalogs thought themselves Filipinos long before they were taught that to be nationalistic is to learn the national language.

I think the national language is even an obstacle to patriotism. If being Filipino has to do with speaking Filipino, then the better Filipino speaker would naturally be the better Filipino. The non-tagalog speaker would then have to choose between the national language and his mother tongue. The former calls upon a misinformed nationalism and the latter carries the pride of ones ancestors and culture. Whatever the choice, it is the non-tagalog that looses. Either he turns his back to his fellow Filipinos or he subordinates the language of his ancestors to the invented national language.

I think there are better options than imposing a regional language (tagalog) as a national language... look at Switzerland, India, Singapore, USA...

[kyuusai]

it shud have been the BISAYA bcoz ang mga bisaya dali makat-on di pareha anang mga tagalog bulol when they try to speak in bisaya dialect not like us bisaya....dabah...

[antoy hilom]

I'm reposting here a reply in another thread where I touched on the contentious subject on national language:

Wa koy lalis all of the above! ... and let me add Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic a hodgepodge of Hebrew and Latin languages because that was the lingua franca at that time in the Middle East...and it did not make Him a lesser Jew.

The crux of the problem with our education system as far as languages is concerned is the over-emphasis of Pilipino in the curriculum...for our Bisaya children (especially those that don't watch tagalog soap operas), Pilipino can be a real struggle. I've seen how my kids grapple with Pilipino in their homework for subjects like Hekasi, Rizal, Pilipino... useless study hours which could have been better spent studying science and math and ENGLISH... and that explains why English proficiency has deteriorated in our country and we are now overtaken by Vietnam and other Asian countries.

The issue is- why ban the Bisaya language in our schools?.. while it's okay to speak Tagalog? And why didn't the DECS encourage a curriculum for non-tagalog languages and culture if they are serious in espousing the love of country. this is a slow and subtle form of ethnic cleansing... without us Bisdaks aware of it! Love of country and and a sense of nationhood is pure lipservice if you do not have pride in your ethnicity and culture and language!

National language? that's hypocrisy! The Americans don't speak Cherokee Indian or Apache, the Argentinians speak italian and spanish and look what they've contributed to the world of ballroom dancing- TANGO! Almost the entire south america speak spanish - the mexicans, nicaraguans, guatemalans, costa ricans,etc. yet they have retained their culture and national pride! The Brazilians speak Portuguese and they gave the world their Samba, capoeira, Bossa Nova! Unya kitang mga Pinoy nag hilas hilas man jud ta nga naa kunuhay tay National language, what have we contributed to the world? Japayukis?


And that my friend is the reason why we have remained backwards all these years because of the insistence of our government on a national language policy! Binoang na!

[sierrafreeze]

Bisaya.. or Cebuano. Y? coz most of the visayas and mindanao area can speak and understand the language very well..