POST-SABBATICAL NOTES. 22 AUG 2014. FRIDAY. N1. Linguistic asymmetry and linguistic injustice: The Philippine case. I HAVE TALKED about this in the past, and in one talk at the University of the Philippines some years, I mentioned about this. But people were not in the know about this, and all I got were blank, blank, blank stares. A paranoid like me would have thought about the people in the audience thinking about what I was talking about, and perhaps, having these nasty thoughts in their Tagalogized head: What is this person talking about? Simple. Linguistic asymmetry happens in a multilingual country when only one or two languages are given the army and the navy and all the financial resources to develop, teach, research, and think in those languages, while the rest of the other languages are othered, marginalized, peripheralized courtesy of unjust laws those Tagalogized minds always resort to because: 1. they do not have any other rational defense to their injustice, and 2. they use the law to terrorize and dominate and muffle the voices of the others that are not like them. This is what is happening now to the many of those in one group whose name sports a presumptuous presumption of what they are, and thus, I would not mention them, and give them a sound byte. Of the more than 100 M people of the Philippines, only few--very few, indeed--ever realize that we are here taken for a ride, that we are going through this ferris wheel of irrational ideas, and that these people are rehashing the same arguments we have heard for a long, long time since Quezon and company rammed into our throat what he had in his egoistic mind about his pet project, Tagalog, his Tagalog, as that national language. That academic sporting the title associate professor must be so desperate to even use the composition of the INL as a proof that these other commissioners agreed to this linguistic injustice. One substance of the phenomenon of linguistic asymmetry is that the state teaches one or two favored and privileged languages and let the other languages go to hell. WPH/
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 00:15:18 +0000
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