Unity with respect for all ethnic languages

My good friend Lino Faelnar, of Save Our Languages through Federalism (SOLFED), sent me a news item from Yahoo News saying, "In the concluding Mass of his four-day visit to Germany in the city of Cologne, his first foreign travel as Pope Benedict XVI… ended by urging pilgrims — speaking in French, English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Swahili, Tagalog, and German — to spread the Church’s message of love and forgiveness across the world." Incidentally, the Pope also does this during his Easter message, "Urbi et Urbi."

That Pope Benedict XVI wants to spread the Gospel of Christianity in all the languages of the world is a reflection of God’s will, which you will read in Genesis 11: 1-9, which goes: "At first, the people of the whole world had only one language and used the same words. 2As they wandered about in the East, they came to a plain in Babylonia and settled there. 3They said to one another, ‘Come on! Let’s make bricks and bake them hard.’ So they had bricks to build with and tar to hold them together. 4They said, Now let’s build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all over the earth.

5Then the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which they had built, 6and He said, "Now then, these are all one people and they speak one language; this is just the beginning of what they are going to do. Soon they will be able to do anything they want! 7Let us go down and mix up their languages so that they will not understand each other. 8So the Lord scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9The city was called Babylon, because there the Lord mixed up the language of all the people and from there he scattered them all over the earth." This is especially true to the 7,000 or so islands that comprise the Philippine archipelago, where we speak different languages… mind you, they’re not dialects.

Now that was a passage from the Old Testament and as we know, the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament, and in Pentecost Sunday you will read in Acts 2:5-12: "5There were Jews living in Jerusalem, religious people who had come from every country in the world. 6When they heard this noise, a large crowd gathered. They were all excited, because all of them heard the believers talking in their own languages. 7In amazement and wonder they exclaimed, ‘These people who are talking like this are Galileans! 8How is it then, that all of us hear them speaking in our own native languages?’

9We are from Parthia, Media, and Elam; from Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia; from Pontus and Asia, 10from Phrygia and Pamphylia, from Egypt and the regions of Libya near Cyrene. Some of us are from Rome, 11both Jews and some of us are from Crete and Arabia — yet all of us hear them speaking in our own languages about the great things that God has done! 12Amazed and confused, they kept asking each other, ‘What does this mean?’" Clearly, this means that although God created all of us as equals, we are born to speak different tongues. In short, Filipinos speak Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilonggo, Bicolano, Ilocano, Waray, etc.

Pope Benedict XVI correctly told the youth to evangelize the Gospel in their own tongues and for the Philippines, he said it in Tagalog. But I’m sure that of the 700 or so Filipinos who attended the World Youth Day, not all of them are Tagalogs. I know that a lot of Cebuanos, Ilonggos and Ilocanos attended this event. It is just obvious that the Pope hasn’t been told about the existence of the 60 other languages spoken throughout the Philippine archipelago, and I dare say that this is the failure of the archdioceses to inform the Vatican that not all Filipinos speak Tagalog.

The Philippine STAR headline last Monday blared, "GMA: Let’s end divisiveness," and I fully agree that it is time for the Filipino people to unite because as one nation, we can achieve more than we can ever dream of. To achieve this unity, we must recognize our cultural diversity and show our respect for the other languages spoken in this country… that one ethnic Filipino group should never believe that they are superior to the other ethnic groups. Only then could we achieve a modicum of unity in the midst of all this diversity.

No doubt, there will be a lot of nationalists who would insist that Filipinos should speak only one language called Pilipino. Alas, Pilipino, as it is spoken, is 99.9 percent derived from the Tagalog language, hence whether they like it or not, Pilipino is, in truth, a dialect of the Tagalog language. So rather than insist that students all over the nation learn to speak Tagalog disguised as Pilipino, we should learn to preserve all our spoken languages and dialects so that they would never disappear.

Last Monday, the Cebu Daily News came up with a story entitled, "Bringing life to a dying language," which featured former University of the Philippines (UP) president Francisco Nemenzo, who was recognized by the Cebu tri-media as the "Outstanding Cebuano" in the field of education. I have no doubt that Dr. Nemenzo experienced a "paradigm shift" in rethinking the language policies of this country when he established during his term the Cebuano Language and Cultural Studies at the UP Cebu College. Dr. Nemenzo finally admitted that "Cebuano is a dying language" and preserving Cebuano would preserve our cultural identity and sense of belonging. He said, "Education should be regionalized or customized according to the locality’s language or dialect." That is exactly our point… when Filipinos begin to love one another regardless of our creed, tongue or color, only then can we truly feel that sense of belonging as one Filipino nation.

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Yes, our talk show, "Straight from the Sky," bagged the Best Television Talk Show award from the 12th Cebu Archdiocese Mass Media Awards (CAMMA) last Sunday evening. We want to share this recognition with the people responsible for making our talk show a success… our TV crew, Albert Dajab, Chris del Mar, Jaime Remulta, and Alan Aliviado, and my director, Ms. Ella del Leon. Thanks also to SkyCable for its continued support. And most especially to our sponsors and our guests and most of all, our valued televiewers and patrons who help make "Straight from the Sky" the longest-running talk show in Cebu.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talk show, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.