Salamat, Manila!

A full week has gone by since my interview with the Baybayin artist, and the more I uncover Manila, the more I wish I had time to explore other parts of the Philippines. I’ve learned that this beautiful country is made up of over 7,000 islands, all of which together are home to around 180 languages. Given this incredible linguistic diversity, one would think there would be interest in studying languages and linguistics…but as a linguistics professor from the University of the Philippines shared in our interview on Friday, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in the subject. Before I dive into my reflections from that interview, below are some photos from my last week in Manila. 

In between interviews, I’ve been wandering through the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Anthropology, navigating the lively streets of Binondo (the world’s oldest Chinatown, full of Mandarin signage thanks to the long-standing local Chinese community), and sampling street food like kwek-kwek (quail eggs in friend dough), turon, and colorful drinks in melon, calamansi, and avocado flavors. I even braved balut – a fertilized duck egg that is boiled and eaten with salt and vinegar. I’ve hopped in tuk tuks and Manila’s iconic jeepneys – brightly decorated, repurposed military jeeps left behind by the Americans that have now become a cultural icon of the Philippines. For 13 pesos per person (around $0.23), you can hop on and off anywhere along the route, signaling the driver to stop by hitting the roof and calling “para!” I was glad to have the company of other travelers for my first jeepney ride; there’s no way I would have been able to learn the unspoken rules otherwise!

 

 

 

The past week also brought new friends: a Spanish traveler I met at my hostel joined me for the Salcedo Saturday Market and a Sunday wandering Intramuros (meaning “within walls”), the historic walled city that houses Spanish colonial architecture. We went into centuries-old churches, Fort Santiago, the National Museum of Fine Arts, and caught the sunset at Rizal Park, which was packed with families and street performers. Earlier in the week, I went to a “lecture on tap” event – an academic talk held in a bar – hosted by the Digital Nomad Association of the Philippines. The speaker, a communications professor from De La Salle University (DLSU), was someone I’d already been in touch with, and the event led me to meet a woman my age who’s lived in the Philippines for 13 years after growing up in the US, China, and Hong Kong. A few days later, we met for lunch at a local Korean restaurant and then grabbed a coffee in Makati. 

On Wednesday afternoon, I interviewed a local police officer who, in his mid-thirties, somehow balances his work on the force with guiding tours of the city and studying pediatrics at DLSU. He grew up in Tondo, one of Manila’s poorest districts, where only a handful of his childhood friends “made it out.” He described the stark divide between public and private schools, the dangers of the Isla (a place even police avoid due to entrenched crime networks), and his fluency in English, Tagalog, and Bisaya. He offered his take on the Philippines’ colonial past: that Spanish is not widely spoken despite centuries of rule because of the cruelty of the Spanish era, while the Japanese occupation was remembered as even more brutal. Yet he insisted Filipinos harbor “no hard feelings” toward visitors from former colonizing countries, welcoming them without grudges. 

 

 

 

Early Friday afternoon, I once again made my way from Makati to Quezon City, this time to the University of the Philippines Diliman campus. When I last visited this part of Manila to interview the Baybayin artist, I actually arrived – apologetically – about a half hour late. This time, now a seasoned Manila traffic veteran, I made sure to get going with plenty of time. Once I arrived (on time!), I met with a professor in the UP linguistics department – the only university linguistics department, I soon learned, in the entirety of the Philippines. While some other universities may offer programs in linguistics, there is no standalone department for the subject. The UP department is staffed by about sixteen full-time faculty, with roughly seventy graduate students and twice as many undergraduates. That is the entire academic infrastructure for a nation of over a hundred million people.

But numbers only tell part of the story. The more compelling reality emerged as we spoke about what the work of a linguist in the Philippines actually entails. Here, a linguist’s work cannot be devoted solely to language. In other countries, it’s possible to devote a career to a single subfield – phonology, syntax – without needing to justify why it matters beyond academic circles. But in the Philippines, he explained, if you are a linguist, you are by default an advocate and an activist. The work is not just research; it’s a responsibility. If you do not fight for endangered languages (of which there are about 35 in the Philippines), no one else will. I thought about how many linguists in the U.S., including students like me, have the privilege of seeing linguistic activism as optional rather than intrinsic to the field.

Government involvement in language revitalization, I learned, is uneven at best. The Philippines has two official languages: English and Filipino, the latter being a standardized form largely based on Tagalog and influenced by other regional languages. The Commission on the Filipino Language is tasked with promoting the country’s linguistic diversity, but internal disputes often derail progress. The Commission commonly seeks the expertise of linguists like my interlocutor, but meetings are sometimes postponed because members are at odds, and despite the Commission’s mandate, no trained linguists sit among its members. Instead, it is composed of regional representatives and various stakeholders – a structure my interviewee suggested could be more effective if informed by people with expertise spanning multiple language families and regions. Even the commission’s name, centered on “Filipino,” subtly narrows its focus, despite its aim to develop, preserve, and promote various Philippine languages. 

Against this backdrop, there are still deeply committed projects. My interviewee co-leads an ongoing project to create orthographies for the non-Tagalog languages of MIMAROPA, an administrative region whose acronym is a combination of its constituent provinces: Mindoro, Marinduque, Romblon, and Palawan. It’s a project initiated by the Indigenous Peoples Education Program of the MIMAROPA Division of the Department of Education, and it brings linguists into direct collaboration with community members to design spelling guides and written standards. Much like the Welsh Language Commissioner’s work in Wales, these experts operate in an advisory capacity – at the end of the day, it is up to the local governments to decide what they wish to actually implement. 

My interviewee described traveling to MIMAROPA with his team to work directly with community members on creating these orthographies. Much of that work involves sitting with elders, talking through words, and deciding how best to represent them in writing. For some, these conversations bring a sudden and painful awareness: that their language is literally dying. The way their parents spoke, the words their grandparents used in daily life, are no longer heard or seen anywhere, and their descendants – their grandchildren – use a different language entirely. They are the last speakers, and with them will go not just vocabulary but the culture and stories those words carry. It can be an emotional and painful process, my interlocutor explained, for the communities involved. Preserving a dying language is like protecting a family heirloom, except here, the family is an entire people, bound by a shared past and a story of survival against every attempt to erase them. The very fact that these words are still spoken, however faintly, is proof that people endured.

Two years ago, in a seminar on Brazilian film, I watched Xingu, a movie based on the story of three brothers whose journey into the Amazon gradually transforms into a mission to protect Indigenous lands in Brazil. One thread of the film mirrors the purpose behind my project: the portrayal of a language on the brink of extinction, spoken fluently by only two remaining people. With the help of a linguist, they begin to develop an orthography, documenting and carrying this language forward. Listening to this professor’s stories about the MIMAROPA project and about elders who realize they may be the last voices of their mother tongue, I recalled the story told in Xingu. What I had once seen as a moving subplot in a film is, for many here, an urgent reality. It’s the same fight – whether in the Amazon or on an island in the Philippines – to make sure that when the last fluent speaker is gone, the language doesn’t vanish with them. 

With that, my stay in Manila is coming to an end. I’m incredibly grateful for what I’ve learned in my time here, not just in relation to this project, but also about my own relationships to research, travel, and people. I have another 20-hour travel day tomorrow, flying first from Manila to Kuala Lumpur, and from there to Auckland. I’ve learned that wherever you think New Zealand is, it’s probably a little farther! 

Thank you to everyone who has been keeping up with this journey. I’ll be writing from my fifth and final country soon!