Pangasinan

A lot of people know that my Uncle Joe likes lamb chops, especially in Greek cuisine. He speaks Tagalog, Ilocano, Pangasinan, and English. He is interested in French. Now in 2021, he is over 80 years old.

After school hours, my brother and I often stopped by my Auntie Mila's house at Kamias Street in Quezon City to play with my cousins. It was an ancient mansion that was once a foreign embassy. Workers supposedly moved it brick by brick from an outlying province into the city. Auntie Mila was a person attuned to Philippine native culture. She liked all these handmade wooden and shell native crafts. On the other hand, her husband, my Uncle Joe, was very pro-American and inculcated their kids in the English language early on because they intended on later emigrating to the USA. I thought to myself that it was unusual that these cousins spoke English at home as if they were actors on television. But they did speak Tagalog with us. Uncle Joe was from a province, Pangasinan, where Tagalog was a second language; there, people spoke the language Pangasinan amongst themselves. He spoke also the regional language, Ilocano.