In Defense of Chabacano

One of the objectives of the Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language is to encourage the use of Spanish in the Philippines.

The fact is that Spanish is no longer spoken in the Philippines, and we, the Filipino Hispanists, are looking for ways of making Spanish accessible, so to speak, for the Filipinos.

One way is through Chabacano, one of the Philippine dialects that is closest to the Spanish language in syntax and vocabulary, more so than the other Philippine dialects.

In fact, Chabacano is some sort of a watered down Spanish, a kind of Spanish referred to as Creole or “Pidgin” Spanish.

For us, members of the Academy, if we want to reach our objective of broadening the horizons of Spanish in the Philippines, and hopefully, making it again an official and spoken language as it once was in our history, perhaps teaching Spanish in schools by way of Chabacano might be considered a possibility. Of course, this method could cause frowns among Spanish purists in the Philippines or even academics of the Spanish language around the world.

At one time, Spanish was considered in the Philippines as the language of the learned, and not of the masses. We see this in the whole concept of the “ilustrado” in our 19th century history. However, in the 21st century, we are no longer living in this era of the “enlightenment”. Democracy and the masses are the radical elements of the 20th and the 21st century. We can no longer live in our ivory towers; it is necessary to go down to the masses and simplify the Spanish language in order to make it accessible to the common person, and not only to the intellectuals.

What I have proposed in the past and even upto this day is to create an easy grammar based on Philippine dialectology. A massive problem in the Spanish syntax is, as in any Romance language bases on Latin and Greek, is the complexity of the verb structure. What has to be done, which is really what the Chabacano verb is all about, is a simplified form of the temporal and personal verbal conjugations.

In Tagalog, Chinese or most Asian languages, temporal conjugations aren’t used when adverbs of time are already in a sentence. Thus, like Chinese or Tagalog, we can simplify the verbal conjugation by leaving the verb in the infinitive, and just adding the adverb of time to specify the temporal element. Of course, the subject of the verb, as in Tagalog, would be essential.

A parallelism would be such: in Tagalog, we would say “Kakain ako bukas” (I eat [am eating] tomorrow) and “kakain ako ngayon” (I eat today). The simplified version which would parallel both English and Tagalog expressions would be: Yo comer manana( I eat tomorrow ) and Yo comer hoy (I eat today). In other words, students won’t have to worry about the future of “comer” which is “comere” or “como” (present 1st person singular).

This “easy grammar” concept is practiced in Chabacano which follows the tradition of oriental languages in concept. An important factor is identifying the subject; in Spanish or Latin, the pronominal subject is optional; it is only put for emphasis. In Philippine dialects, as in most Asian languages, the subject of the sentence, whether it be a noun or pronoun, is essential.

The word “come” in Chabacano is the corrupted form of the infinitive “comer”, and therefore, is used in all conjugated instances, whether past, present or future. Thus, “vos come”, “ella come”, “tu come”, etc.

What I have jsut briefly described is one simple example of how we should simplify and make Spanish flexible for the Filipino through the use of Chabacano, and therefore, encourage students to learn Spanish knowing that Filipino dialects are offsprings of Spanish.

I hope that in the future, Philippine universities would offer courses of this nature in order to appreciate Philippine dialects as they relate to Spanish.

*** This article was originally posted at emanila.com on Jan 4, 2003. It was sent in to us by Alberto D. Hernandez of Barcelona, Spain who requested to have it reprinted from Revista Filipina (a magazine about the Hispanic-Filipino world in Spanish). The magazine is directed by Edmundo Farolan, a member of the Philippines Academy of the Spanish Language.

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