This is my English

Last month, I attended a fellowship of campus journalists in Bacolod City and I had the opportunity to meet two people who unintentionally reawakened my empathy for the Filipino language and other local dialects. The two people challenged me to a point that I was compelled to speak on behalf of the participants who are not fluent in English, or at least those people who do not have that twang when they speak in English.

I am referring to the fellowship’s hosts who spoke in a manner I have never encountered before. Yes, they are good at their craft – talking – and they speak English fluently, the type that is tunog imported or legit for most of us. But they were bad at hosting; it was disturbing how they interacted with the audience. The two hosts kept belittling the part of the audience, presumably those who do not use English as their principal language and those who were unfamiliar with the tunog imported way of using the language.

It was the first time I have seen a host include pronunciation exercises in his spiel. They asked the participants to repeat the word “the” until we were able to pronounce it properly, similar to the way the two hosts speak—the one that sounds like thuh. When we were asked to do that, my initial reaction was, “Why do we need to do all this nonsense?”

What annoyed me the most was when they started discussing more sensitive topics pertaining to the correct usage of the English language. It is as if they were lecturing the participants that the proper way of speaking the English language, is how they speak the language. Case in point, they kept using highfalutin English words that were unfamiliar to those who do not use English as their conversational tongue, the kind of words most of the audience, even participants from Manila, do not use every day.

It could also be considered that the hosts were not just making fun of how majority of the participants does not sound imported when they speak in English. For me, it was as if they were considering themselves more superior to those who cannot speak proper English. In many ways, I had this feeling that they were into the idea that a person’s usage of the English language determines the amount of respect that a person deserves – the inability of a person to speak English properly entitles one to receive a basketful of mockery.

My point is that good hosts do not just think of what they are supposed to say or the flow of their spiels, but they should also consider the manner they are going to deliver their lines, the kind that is tailor-fitted to their target audience. They are the ones who should blend in with the crowd and not the other way around.

With all due respect to people who naturally speak that way, maybe such a behavior is not supposed to offend people who do not use English as their primary language. But nonetheless, that experience made me realize that there are still people who believe that their mastery of this language gives them the divine supremacy over those who are not at par with their mastery. In the case of the hosts, even if they are good in English, maybe because they grew up abroad or maybe they had an opportunity to work abroad, it still does not earn them the right to subjugate people who do not speak the way they speak.

We have our own English, the kind that is almost free from any foreign intonation—as it is used with our vernacular’s accent—and loaded with ‘easy-to-use’ or everyday words. It deserves respect because that is how our local culture seamlessly merges with the language.

Even if my nationalist orientation, or mainly my preference towards the use of our vernacular, steers me towards this point-of-view, I am not discounting the idea that the English language deserves to be used properly. I still believe that most of us need to improve our understanding of the language. What I am trying to point out is that there are more appropriate ways of addressing people who are unfamiliar with the language, humiliating and mocking their manner of using the language is not obviously one of them.