Rosario notices how her mother’s friends talk, small-town bourgeois women who idolize the most famous of their number, the “Rose of Tacloban,” the dictator’s wife, Imelda Marcos. As a university student, she observes that “people spoke in fragments, neither Tagalog nor English, as if sounding broken mattered.” If inarticulacy “matters,” it is as a mark of authenticity, a way to signify distance from both Tagalog-speaking majoritarianism and the lingering grip of American empire.Īpostol teases out the ways that each Filipino generation, region and class has its own linguistic struggles and idiosyncrasies. She finds that “Spanish was for the outside things, the things you could make.” So la mesa is the table, la cama is the bed and so on, but “Warays kept their words for the inside, the things that made you up.”Īs Rosario grows up and eventually makes the decision to leave her country to pursue a career as a novelist, she finds herself confronted at every turn by the political meanings of language. Her life, like that of all Filipinos, is a constant act of translation. Like Apostol, the narrator, Rosario, was raised on the Philippine island of Leyte, and her first language is Waray, the seventh most commonly spoken in the country, though she was forced to learn Tagalog at school. The book’s substance is a story about a New York writer who is forced to come to terms with her difficult family history, but its most profound preoccupations are linguistic. During World War II, the Philippines was occupied by the Japanese, leaving yet another linguistic deposit.Īmid such a polyglot swirl, what tongue should a Filipino literature speak? The answer given by Gina Apostol in her sprawling, ambitious new novel, “La Tercera,” is - all of them. A 1935 constitution established English, alongside Spanish, as an official language.

Hard on the heels of this new colonial occupation, a transport ship carrying 600 teachers arrived, to disseminate English as a “civilizing” medium. Whole towns of people found themselves with names beginning with the same letter.Īfter the Spanish were overthrown in 1898, Filipinos, who were preparing for independence, found that their nation had been sold to the United States for $20 million. The archipelago was a colonial possession of the Spanish Empire for over 300 years, and an 1849 law forced Filipinos to adopt Spanish surnames from an official list, with certain letter ranges being more or less randomly assigned to particular provinces. Some languages, such as Arabic and Hokkien Chinese, arrived through trade and religious conversion. The national language, known as Filipino, is a standardized version of Tagalog, one of six languages with more than a million native speakers. There are nearly 200 languages spoken in the Philippines, according to some government estimates.

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