I read an opinion article by Isabel Escoda in the Philippine Daily Inquirer dated June 20, 2007. It was about Filipino mother in Hong Kong whose 9-year-old got home from school one day and told her mom about what the teacher told the whole class about what we all Filipinos know, the “Pinoy English”. The child’s teacher told the class not to pick up English from Filipinos because “their English is not good, especially their accents”. The situation may have been sort of different because according to the article, it was the household help who did most of the supervising and teaching of the child. But wait, the maid is not just an ordinary maid as one would expect. What I’m talking about is the usual situation here in the Philippines that maids are uneducated. That maid was once a Math teacher and the mother of the child is a lecturer in English literature at a Hong Kong university.
I’ll leave the article and tell you what I really think.
For me, there is no standard way of speaking English. We are not Americans nor are we English. We are Filipinos and our mother tongue would, obviously, get in the way and make English sound weird. Hence, we have the term, “accents”. These accents, in some way, add to our culture and our Filipino-ness. We have to admit that not all of us are blessed with American or British English in our tongues when we were born. I was really insulted by that teacher because I am a Filipino too. She is stereotyping us and degrading our capability to speak English.
According to Isabel Escoda:
“Unwittingly, that Filipina letter-writer highlighted the disparity between the general mass of “Pinoys” [Filipinos] and individuals like herself who make up the minority educated elite. The vast majority of her compatriots, mainly migrant workers, don’t use the “received English” acceptable to the language sticklers. A native-born English speaker wouldn’t employ the Pinoy term “actuation” when they mean act or action, or “anomaly” for a crime or illegality, since that’s not how it’s defined in the Oxford Dictionary.
Pinoy inventiveness with English can be seen in the quaint “For a while” reply that receptionists use with callers.
Pinoy syntax transforms verbs, as in “I GOT five children in the Philippines,” or “Do you LIKE to go to the house of Mel now?” or “I WILL BE THE ONE to do that.”
Grammar can likewise take surprising turns, as in “I already do that yesterday,” or “My boss give me my salary last week,” or “Can you take your passport here tomorrow?”
Then there are the unique pronunciations as in KOOLchoor (culture), canDIDacy (candidacy), CAYshire (cashier) and CAYbin (cabin).
Indeed, as a foreign writer once said about Pinoy English, “The creative confusion between language and culture leads to more than just simple unintentional errors in syntax, but in the adoption of new words.” With some 10 percent of the population working abroad, in the constant struggle to survive, Filipinos’ bizarre ways of using English have sometimes been denigrated. At the same time, they have been a unique source of humor for foreigners and Filipinos alike.”
