The Second Largest English Speaking Country

When I was living in Japan I took occasional pleasure in ridiculing the locals’ comical ineptness in speaking English (or any other foreign language), a short-coming shared by the common man and even most academics. It’s a very different situation linguistically here in the Philippines!

The north of the Philippines is only a short flight away from the south of Japan, but people are gifted language-wise to a degree I have seen in no other country. On the island where I live, Negros, the Visayan language is spoken on the eastern side of the big mountains in the center, and Ilongo on the west. Hence many people speak Visayan, Ilongo, Tagalog and English. Tagalog is the language originally spoken around Manila, which was declared the national language at some point. In the least case, in other parts of the country, people speak English and Tagalog. This is not only the case for the educated classes, every bus driver or sales girl will at least be able to speak moderately fluent English, certainly beating out most Austrian politicians (and check out this gem!).

Genius cultural appropriators (omfg don’t let those PC aficionados catch you!), the Filipinos took religions from the Spanish (Catholicism) and the Arabs (Islam, in the south; not really sure if either was a good idea), fast food from the Americans (fried chicken beats any religion in my book) and lots of vocabulary for their own languages from the Spanish. During the US colonial period, English must have caught on quickly and all of the tertiary education in the country is now held in English. I have middle-class friends who exclusively speak English to their kids, since they will learn the local languages later in school, anyway, and top fluency in English will give them a head-start in life.

There is a number of languages or dialects in the country, it’s hard to say how many exactly, since the transitions between languages are somewhat fluent. “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” goes the lingustic wisdom (“A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot” in Yiddish, attributed to Max Weinreich). For example Austria has no navy, hence Austrian is not officially a separate language from German. The lack of naval forces also makes it hard to assign official proper language status to some regional tongues.

When I teach at the University of the Philippines, all the students speak perfect English, and I’m the one with the fat (Germanic) accent. The pronunciation is melodic, quite pleasant to my ears. If you are in Australia and want to hear it, just call the complaints line of your cell phone provider, and you will most likely end up talking to someone in a call center in the Philippines. At least for me, that always worked to calm my anger over some billing issue!

A number of unique phrases and words have developed in Filipino English. This is not incorrect English in my opinion, but its own version of Shakespeare’s language. This is, after all, the second largest English speaking country, behind the US. These phrases and words would be used in common life around the country, most of them not at a university, where people really express themselves in a very sophisticated maner; This is everyday Filipino English:

Some examples:

The “incharge” has become a job title. “Who can turn on the water pump?” “Ronnie is the incharge”, a short form of “the one in charge” which has morphed into a noun of its own right. On a cautionary note, the incharge is quite often not around when urgently needed.

Sometimes the incharge might be “taking a bath”. Does that mean he is siting in a bathtub? No, he is taking a shower. Here, a phrase has slightly drifted in meaning.

Or, the incharge might be in the “CR”. That’s the “comfort room”. The toilet. What if a toilet is really filthy and uncomfortable? It’s still a CR.

A cheap way to get around is by “jeepney”. It’s a modification of “jeep”. When the US military left after WWII, they left behind jeeps, which were converted to public transport vehicles. Often the paint jobs on these are real artworks.

“Easy ride” is a smaller, modern version of a jeepney, a modified small truck with seats in the back. What if there is no space to properly sit in the easy ride, and riding it is really hard? It’s still an easy ride.

To “get down” is to get off the easy ride. Makes perfect sense. Again, a slight shift in the wording of a phrase.

“Boss!” is a friendly salutation, often combined with a bit of a sales-pitch. “Boss! Sunglasses? Viagra?”. “Bossing” is sometimes used to address a person who is an actual boss in a business.

“To have a nervous” is the correct way of saying “to be nervous”.

A “nose bleed” is the mental state of being nervous about having to speak in English to a foreigner. Even though most people are not shy and speak English well, there is still sometimes a bit of a language barrier: the nosebleed. At one point last year when there was actually blood running from my nose after I ruptured a small blood vessel during a dive, someone asked me jokingly if I didn’t want to speak English.

“High blood” is when one is so angry that the blood pressure rises. It’s an adjective. “He borrowed my motor and didn’t even ask me. I’m high blood”. In this sentence, motor = motorcycle, another shortening of the original word. A few more of these exist, for instance ref = refrigerator, unlike “fridge” in American English. The Filipinos and Americans chose different parts of the complete word to form their abbreviation.

I gather from reading on the internet that some Anglo-Saxon ideologues are having a nervous about which personal pronouns must be used for what kind of transgender person. Fil-English has the original gender-neutral pronoun: the “mamser”. That’s a fusion of “mam” and “sir”, often used by waitresses, as in “Mamser, are you ready to order?”.

Challenge to the artistically gifted readers: draw a picture of a mamser!

“What’s yours?” is a direct translation of “unsa imong?”, and is one of the few Fil-English phrases which come about by direct translation.

So let’s combine all of this:

“Mamser, I hope there is already water in your house after you get down from the easy ride so that you can take a bath, because the incharge repairing the piping got stuck on his CR.”

A perfectly correct English sentence, which, after our little lesson in Fil-English, you can now comprehend!

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