31/08/2026
๐๐๐๐ฅ๐จ๐๐ | When Language Becomes ๐๐ฅ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ต๐ช๐ต๐บ
Every August, classrooms across the Philippines come alive with celebrations of Buwan ng Wika. Students wear traditional attire, recite Filipino poems, perform folk dances, and suddenly proudly speak the language that has connected generations. For many, it is a month of ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ celebration โ a tribute to the words that have shaped who we are. Yet beyond the festivities lies the question: What are we ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ข๐ญ๐ญ๐บ celebrating?
The first thing a child learns is not how to read or write. It is a voice.
A mother's gentle โanakโ. A grandfather calling everyone to the dinner table. The laughter that echoes through a neighborhood where everyone seems to know each other's names. Before we understand grammar or memorize vocabulary lists, we learn belonging through the sounds of the people who raised us. ๐๐ข๐ฏ๐จ๐ถ๐ข๐จ๐ฆ ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ค๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ด ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ณ ๐ง๐ช๐ณ๐ด๐ต ๐ฉ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ.
Growing up in the Philippines means growing up in more than one language. We answer attendance in English, joke in Filipino, switch to Taglish with friends, and return to the language of our grandparents whenever home begins to feel like home again. We move between words so naturally that we rarely stop to ask what they have been doing to us all along. It is only when someone leaves home that they begin to notice.
The familiar greetings become messages on a screen. Conversations with loved ones are interrupted by unstable internet connections and time differences. The language they speak every day slowly changes โ not because people choose to forget, but because survival asks them to adapt. New places demand new words. New communities expect different ways of speaking.
Then one day, someone struggles to remember the exact Filipino word for an object they had named effortlessly their entire life. ๐๐ต ๐ง๐ฆ๐ฆ๐ญ๐ด ๐ด๐ฎ๐ข๐ญ๐ญ. ๐๐ฏ๐ต๐ช๐ญ ๐ช๐ต ๐ฅ๐ฐ๐ฆ๐ด๐ฏ'๐ต.
Because language has never been just a collection of words. It carries memories that dictionaries cannot define. It remembers the lullabies sung before bedtime, the teasing between siblings, the comfort hidden in a simple โkumain ka na ba?โ It carries jokes that refuse to make sense once translated and emotions that somehow become smaller when spoken in another language. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way Filipinos laugh.
Our humor often lives somewhere between the lines: in the perfectly timed "Ay, wow," the dramatic "sige na nga," the playful insult that somehow means affection, and the Taglish sentence that would sound completely ordinary to us but confusing to anyone listening from the outside. Sometimes, all it takes is one word.
In 2024, a commercial featuring Maja Salvador became a viral meme after her exaggerated repetition of a seemingly ordinary, hifalutin word struck a familiar chord with Filipinos. The joke was not necessarily in the word itself. It was in her delivery โ the repetition, the emphasis, the expression that made an otherwise grand-sounding word suddenly ridiculous. Filipinos recognized the humor almost immediately because we know the habit: when someone uses an unusually deep or formal word, we repeat it, stretch it, and make a joke out of how serious it sounds. It is a small thing, but that is precisely what makes it so revealing.
The joke works because there is already an understanding between the people laughing. No dictionary can explain why the repetition is funny. No translation can perfectly carry the timing of the punchline. It is something we simply get. We stretch syllables, exaggerate intonation, turn words into punchlines, and make language part of the performance itself. In Filipino, language is rarely just spoken; it is played with. It becomes a way of recognizing one another, of saying, ๐ ๐ฐ๐ถ ๐ฌ๐ฏ๐ฐ๐ธ ๐ธ๐ฉ๐ข๐ต ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ข๐ฏ. ๐ ๐ฐ๐ถ ๐จ๐ฆ๐ต ๐ช๐ต.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky asks us to consider whether the language we speak shapes the way we think. In her TED Talk, she points to thousands of languages around the world, each with different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. Her research suggests that these differences are not merely cosmetic. Language can influence what people notice, how they organize information, and how they experience the world around them.
One of her examples comes from the Kuuk Thaayorre people of Australia, whose language uses cardinal directions such as north, south, east, and west instead of relative directions such as left and right. Because of this, speakers develop an extraordinary awareness of their surroundings. Another example comes from Russian, where there are separate words for lighter and darker shades of blue, allowing speakers to distinguish between them more quickly.
Language, then, does not simply tell us what something is. It can teach us what to notice. And if the language we speak can shape the way we see the world, perhaps the language we inherit also shapes the way we see ourselves.
For Filipinos, that can be found in the words that have no perfect substitute. ๐๐ข๐ฎ๐ฃ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ is not simply affection. ๐๐ข๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ฐ is not merely resentment. ๐๐ช๐จ๐ช๐ญ is not quite excitement, frustration, or the urge to squeeze something unbearably cute. Even ๐ฑ๐ข๐ฌ๐ช๐ฌ๐ช๐ด๐ข๐ฎ๐ข carries a social meaning that cannot be contained by a single English translation.
These words do more than fill gaps in vocabulary. They reveal what our culture has found important enough to name. Identity becomes most visible in the moments language fails us. Like the child born overseas who understands Filipino but hesitates to speak it. Or the elderly grandparent whose stories can no longer be fully understood by the younger generation. What lies between them is not silence but distance โ one created not by love, but by language slowly slipping away. It is a quiet kind of loss.
The disappearance of a language is rarely dramatic. It happens in ordinary moments. A family choosing convenience over their mother tongue. A classroom where students apologize for speaking with an accent. A child who grows up believing that sounding foreign is somehow more acceptable than sounding like home.
Yet every language carries a history no other language can replace.
In the Philippines, this history does not belong to Filipino alone. It lives across the country's many languages and dialects โ Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Kapampangan, Bikol, Maranao, Tausug, and countless others. Each carries its own humor, expressions, stories, and ways of understanding the world.
To lose one is not simply to lose words. It is to lose a way of seeing. This is where the celebration of Buwan ng Wika becomes more than a school tradition.
The barong, baro't saya, poetry recitals, and Filipino songs are not important because they make us look more Filipino for a month. They matter because they remind us of something we are capable of forgetting when the costumes come off and August ends: that language is alive because people continue to use it, shape it, laugh through it, and pass it on.
A language survives in the grandmother who insists on speaking her dialect. It survives in the parent who teaches their child the words they grew up with. It survives in the friend who says "tara" instead of "let's go," not because one is better than the other, but because some invitations feel more like home in the language we first learned them in. It survives in the joke that needs no explanation. It survives every time someone chooses to speak.
This is why we instinctively return to the language that raised us whenever emotions become too heavy to translate. Happiness, grief, homesickness, and love often arrive wearing the words we first learned as children. In those moments, language reminds us where we came from, even when life has taken us somewhere else.
Maybe identity has never been something we wear. Maybe it is something we speak.
Long before we introduce ourselves with names, achievements, or occupations, our voices tell the world who we are. Every accent carries a history. Every dialect protects a culture. Every word passed from one generation to the next becomes an act of remembrance.
Because when language becomes identity, preserving it is no longer just about saving words. It is about making sure no one forgets where they first learned to belong.
๐๏ธ Ava de Torres
๐จ Shantelle Asuncion
