30/08/2026
Buwan ng Wika
It didn't start with an apocalypse. It started with efficiency.
Nobody looked up definitions anymore; we just let auto-translate bridge the gaps. Slowly, the Tagalog words began to feel redundant. Why hold onto complex, weighted terms when an algorithm could flatten them into quick, digestible English?
One morning, auto-translate failed to recognize "marahuyo." It flagged it as a typo and suggested enchanted. I didn’t think much of it. Neither did anyone else.
The next day, it stopped recognizing "gunita."
Then "laya."
Then "bayan."
At first, people called it the natural death of language. We didn't need those native roots anymore; machine translation was faster, universal, effortless. But as we got used to simply translating rather than understanding, something hollow set in.
When "gunita" dropped out of the digital dictionary, my grandmother stared at her screen, unable to explain the stories her mother used to tell her; the English word memory was too clinical, too sterile to hold what she meant.
When "laya" disappeared, history e-books updated overnight, replacing nuanced struggles for freedom with flat, administrative terms. And when bayan was removed as "outdated slang," people stopped understanding why we were supposed to belong to one another. We were just individuals sharing an archipelago.
I told my grandmother about the disappearing dictionary entries.
She didn't look at her phone. Instead, she took me to an old narra cabinet. From the bottom drawer, she pulled a thin, dust-covered paper notebook. No screens. No cloud sync. Just a single word written in faded black ink on the first page:
"Alalahanin."
"What does it mean?" I asked.
Her hands trembled. "It meant to remember. But the systems stopped flagging it last week. It's not in the database anymore."
By morning, searching "alalahanin" returned a zero-result error: Did you mean 'remind'?
No one remembered the original word. No one remembered the notebook. No one remembered what had been lost in translation.
Except me.
I pulled the physical notebook from beneath my mattress. The digital plague hadn't touched the paper, but my own brain was already struggling. The words were becoming blank shapes to my machine-conditioned eyes.
I flipped to the very last page. A single word stood typed on the yellowed paper:
"Tayo."
Desperate, I opened my phone camera, pointing Google Translate at the page to make sense of it. The screen glitched, its algorithm struggling to parse the isolated entry before displaying a single, cold English output:
To stand. A verb. A literal, rigid translation.
I stared at the screen, then down at the paper. For a moment, the machine almost won. But as I read the word "tayo" with my own eyes, unmediated by a site or a screen, a sudden, physical current rushed through me.
The machine was wrong. It had chosen the static action, missing the heart of the word entirely.
The memories flooded back, unbidden by any search engine. Voices of ancestors speaking in cadences no software could categorize. Faces of people who had planted, fought, built, loved, and endured. A collective heartbeat that couldn't be flattened into an English equivalent.
The word wasn't just a command to stand.
It meant we.
The inclusive we. You, me, and everyone who came before and after.
The algorithm had reduced our language to functional code, turning us into passive consumers of our own identity. But a dictionary didn't create a culture, and a translation tool couldn't erase what was bred into our bones.
A word could be deleted from a server. A definition could be overwritten. A history could be re-indexed.
But as long as we refused to let a machine tell us who we were, as long as someone could look at another person, reject the cold code, and say tayo…
We were still standing. And our story was far from finished.
🖼️: Ahlia Bandola & Hayley Salvador
📝: Zoe Dilla
