Reclaiming My Tagalog Tongue Through...TV?
A Lesson in Language Loss, Preservation, and Pride
Hi friends,
If you already know me and follow my work, you’ll know that I am fiercely Filipina. As the founder of Living Hyphen, a community that explores what it means to live in between cultures, I often introduce the work that I do as stemming from my own experiences as a Filipina-Canadian. One of the primary reasons that I feel so tied to and proud of my heritage is because of my ability to speak my first language of Tagalog.
In fact, I even wrote a love letter to my Tagalog tongue after having returned to the Philippines after nearly a decade away. After so many years in a primarily English-speaking country, my trip back home reminded me of just how beautiful, how lyrical, how absolutely precious my language is.
As I wrote back then, “Tagalog is a language filled with emotion that English could never match. It is full of drama and passion and depth. It is flirtatious and playful and kind. It is charged with feeling, tinged with longing, and sprinkled with a melody so warm it envelops everyone who comes across it. “
You can imagine then my delight when an opportunity to work as a language specialist on a Filipino-Canadian comedy TV sketch show presented itself to me last November.
The show – ABROAD – is a half-hour, satirical, and bilingual sketch series in Tagalog and English that focuses on immigrant experiences in what we now know as “Canada”. Starring and co-created by Isabel Kanaan, the show presents a humorous look at how some immigrants think, perceive, and deal with living in this country.
During the winter, I was on set for the production of the show, working closely with the cast who had varying levels of Tagalog fluency to guide their pronunciation. I also worked closely with producers and directors to help translate scripts and ensure jokes were landing in both languages. I’m currently working in post-production with the video editing team to translate all the dialogue into English and Tagalog, ensure that the Tagalog in each episode is perfect, and verify that all of the subtitles are accurate. The second season of the show is premiering on OMNI Television in Canada this Sunday, June 11th!
It’s been an incredible experience to speak my first language again, something that I don’t often get to do outside of my family gatherings. And to be able to share and celebrate it with a much wider audience? What a rare opportunity that feels like wielding what I’ve always described as a magical power!
But what does any of this have to do with decolonizing, disrupting, and dismantling systems of oppression and rebuilding more equitable systems?
Let me demonstrate that through a deeply personal story…
Weaponizing English as A Badge of Excellence
I grew up in Markham, a suburb just outside of the Greater Toronto Area that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in a culturally rich community where the “visible minorities” were, in fact, the majority of my daily life.
There was a sizeable population of Filipinos in my high school, many of whom were newcomers to the country. They stuck together and often congregated on a small bridge on the second floor of our high school. And because of that, the bridge was dubbed “The F.O.B. Bridge”, meaning the “Fresh Off the Boat Bridge”.
The students in my high school looked down on those Filipino newcomers, criticizing them for only hanging out with each other and for always speaking Tagalog. “Don’t they know they’re in Canada now?” “How are they going to learn English if they only talk to each other?” I can still hear the murmurs. I can still see the eye rolls.
This one is painful and shameful for me to write, but I was one of many who looked at my newcomer Filipino classmates with derision. I intentionally distanced myself from them and extended no kindness despite our shared roots.
I cringe when I think about how I behaved. I didn’t speak ill of these classmates and I was never obviously mean. I just pretended they didn’t exist, which is honestly just as bad (if not worse). I made sure our paths crossed as little as possible, if at all.
I wanted to minimize all the possible associations that could have been made between us. I did so to make sure everyone knew that I wasn’t that kind of Filipino. I wasn’t a “F.O.B.”
I’m Filipino, yes. But mostly, I’m Canadian. And my perfect English proves it.
English As A Tool of White Supremacy and Colonialism
My reflex to distance myself from my newcomer Filipino classmates was an ugly manifestation of my own internalized racism. I judged my kababayan through the lens of whiteness.
And, as much as I am ashamed to say it, I saw myself as better than them because of my proximity to that whiteness, because of my ability to codeswitch to “perfect” unaccented English without a trace of my Tagalog tongue. I used my privilege as a weapon, as a way to elevate myself and put others down.
The standard to speak English and to speak it “perfectly” without any accent — that is to say, without any trace of a European accent — is a colonial standard that seeks to assimilate everyone, removing any traces of our origins. A colonial standard that seeks, as all things colonial do, to dominate.
My classmates and I looked down on our Filipino newcomer classmates because the educational system that we were all a part of pounded the superiority of the English language into our brains from our earliest days. Our English classes taught us our manner of speaking and the rigid rules of grammar. The mainstream media that we all consumed did that work for us too. The only difference was that the media didn’t directly grade us on our performance or train us into submission in such an obvious way.
That this could happen even in such a diverse and multicultural school shows just how deep and insidious white supremacist and colonial thinking is. How systemic it is.
This is just an excerpt from one of my essays for “I Was Wrong”, read the blog in full below.
Rebuilding Inclusive Systems Through Language
It has taken me decades to unlearn this shame and reclaim my Tagalog tongue and speak it with pride anywhere and everywhere that I can. Knowing the subtle and insidious ways in which colonial thinking has seeped itself into my psyche, I now actively work to dismantle that mentality and the behavior that results from it, not just in myself, but also through the work that I do in community – through ABROAD and Living Hyphen.
As the founder of a community that tells stories of the diaspora and the displaced, I am acutely aware of my role and responsibility not to replicate colonial standards of excellence that emphasize “proper” English.
Over the last year, for instance, I’ve been working closely with the Halton District School Board in Ontario to develop programming for their English-Language Learning (ELL) students, as well as their educators, to decolonize their classrooms and create more inclusive and equitable spaces for newcomer and immigrant students. I try to show how language affects not just how we perceive the world but also how we move through it. I share examples of how limiting and limited the English language is, and how much more expansive our worldviews could be if we incorporated other languages. How different languages reveal different cognitive universes, and therefore different intelligences.
I’ve been facilitating writing workshops that encourage students to write and share stories in both their first (or second, third, even fourth!) languages as well as English. Together, we celebrate the depth and richness that comes from multilingual storytelling.
It means a lot to me to be able to show these young students all the opportunities that are available to them, including working in film and television in this bilingual capacity. I love sharing the fact that I’ve been able to work on a TV show sharing my Tagalog language skills! What a difference this would have made for that younger Justine who worked so hard to hide that part of herself.
According to the 2021 census, more than 8.3 million people, or almost one-quarter (23.0%) of the population, are foreign-born individuals who immigrated to Canada. This is the largest proportion since Confederation, topping the previous 1921 record of 22.3%, and the highest among the G7.
Many of these people likely do not speak English as their first language.
By doing this work, I hope to disrupt the idea that English = Excellence while also actively rebuilding systems that are far more inclusive and equitable for all.
Language As A Super Power
My parents knew I would need to speak English to survive and to thrive before we even landed in Canada. They understood our “globalized” world (though I’d call it our Western imperialized world) and what was necessary to succeed. But they were also subversive in their own way, resisting assimilation upon our arrival in Canada as they challenged me to speak Tagalog and hold fast to my native tongue. They knew the importance of this inherently and intuitively. They took pride in our roots long before I knew how.
Today, I am immensely grateful for my parents’ foresight, their pride in our language, and their resistance to assimilate completely. It is a gift to be able to communicate with my elders and go home to the Philippines speaking our native tongue. Learning both languages simultaneously at such a young age meant that I learned how to codeswitch seamlessly between English and Tagalog without a single trace of being able to speak either language. I liken it now to a super power.
I am ashamed for having once weaponized this gift of language – both our own and that of our colonizer’s .
I hold compassion for my younger self for wanting to erase that in the face of a mean and oppressive world that devalues language, heritage, and culture.
I am grateful for knowing better now.
Maraming salamat sa pagbabasa,
Justine
Additional resources on language:
A lot of the writing in this edition of the newsletter is largely derived from past writing on this topic from the last few years as I’ve worked to decolonize my own mind. Read my process here:
Take a look at The Stories of Us, the first-ever English as a Second Language collection of stories written and told by newcomers, for newcomers. It’s a project between Living Hyphen and the Department of Imaginary Affairs that I’m incredibly proud of!
Watch this TED talk on how language can affect the way we think.
Read Learning the Grammar of Animacy from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s phenomenal book, Braiding Sweetgrass.
Read this brilliant piece by The Stories of Us’ project manager, Mathura Mahendren, on holding multiple truths at once while working in a system that teaches and preaches a colonizer’s language.
Follow the Caracol Language Coop., a worker-owned coop led by Latinx im/migrant women and gender non-confirmation people working to create spaces of language justice.
Note: their business has since dissolved but their Instagram feed still has a lot of great educational gems!
What’s happening in my world:
Check out the premiere of ABROAD on June 11 on OMNI television!
Otherwise, I’ll be taking a little break this summer to reset, relax, and recharge my batteries! Woohoo!
Check out a previous newsletter I wrote that is all about Rest As Resistance: Disrupting Our Ideas of Productivity in a Hyper-Capitalist World.