Intellectualized

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Philippine elite started switching from Spanish to English as the archipelagic elitist language, especially in written form, as a consequence of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Meanwhile, indigenous languages have continued to be the aural-oral mainstay, with Spanish loanwords being quite common. In 1937, administration chose Tagalog as the basis of the national language. As time passed, code-switching between English and indigenous languages became more prevalent. As a result, the Philippines is a linguistic hodgepodge. English is like an effervescent pink drink, and Tagalog is a grey shark in the seas. Spanish still rings nostalgically of bygone majestic good ol' days for many Filipinos. Tagalog is still not as fully "intellectualized" as its cousin Indonesian, which Indonesians use in university-level education and has extensive literature.

On its way to Americanization since the Spanish-American War of 1898, in the 1930s, the Philippines was still somewhat a Hispanic country. Manila was the 9th largest Spanish-speaking city in this world in 1930 with 324 552 inhabitants. The switch to English for at least written communication was set in motion. Adding to the linguistic confusion, in 1937, the Philippine government chose Tagalog, out of about 200 native Austronesian languages, as the basis of the national language, because it was already dominant in many parts of the archipelago. By the late 20th century, Taglish, the patois of code-switching between Tagalog and English, became the de facto oral-aural lingua franca in the islands, despite that Tagalog (alias Filipino) and English were separate studied subjects in school. English was the window to the external world, whilst Taglish became the familiar chit-chat on the streets and in the domestic media. Spanish embedded itself as many natural-sounding loanwords within Tagalog, Taglish, and other native languages. Tagalog had not been fully "intellectualized" as a language, as many great international works had not been translated into it. Tagalog used in non-humanities fields of science remained only experimental. Artificial Intelligence and machine translation might give Tagalog a "kangaroo-hopping" boost.

This is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably intellectualized President.