'Most don't realise they're speaking Spanish': The revival of the Philippines' disappearing language (2024)

There's an old adage about the Philippines that says it spent over 300 years in a Spanish convent and 50 years in Hollywood to get to where it is today.

From the late 1500s until 1898, Spain controlled the archipelago, instituting fierce Catholicism and Hispanic culture in the South-East Asian nation.

But Marlon James Sales, a Philippine-born translator and linguist at the University of Michigan, told the ABC that a lot of the country's Spanish influence is often overlooked.

"Most Filipinos don't realise they're speaking Spanish," Dr Sales said.

"Even the idea of the Philippines being a single state is a Spanish invention."

This is mainly due to the English language's subsequent dominance across the islands as a lingua franca throughout the 20th century.

After the Philippines along with Cuba, Guam and Puerto Rico fell under United States rule following America's victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War, English was instated as the language of instruction throughout the expanded American empire.

The Cervantes Institute — Spain's language and cultural agency — estimated that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was an estimated 60 per cent of Filipinos who spoke Spanish as their second language.

But by 1987, Spanish in the Philippines was de-listed as a co-official language, alongside English and Filipino.

Currently only about 0.5 per cent of the Philippines' 100 million-strong population speaks Spanish; however, it's still home to the most number of Spanish speakers in Asia.

But linguistically, the roots of Spanish have not entirely left the Philippines, as a third of the Filipino language is derived from Spanish words, constituting some 4,000 "loan words".

This legacy is evident right from the get-go, as 'hello' (kumusta) is derived from Spanish's 'how are you?' (cómo está).

Today, as the status of Spanish in the country recovers from its 19th-century American defeat, the 21st century is pointing toward a new role for a language traditionally associated with colonial subjugation.

The bilingual economic imperative

Over the past decade, the Philippines has become the world's call centre hub, with more than 1.2 million employees generating about 9 per cent of the country's GDP.

"The situation of having cheap and qualified labour, who could be [easily] trained to speak [Spanish], has promoted Spanish in ways that people 20 to 30 years ago wouldn't have imagined," Dr Sales said.

The Philippines' daily minimum wage is 537 pesos ($15.33) — about 16,500 pesos per month ($470.90).

The Guardian reported that average pay for call centre workers fluctuates between 13,000 to 15,000 pesos per month.

This has seen Australian companies such as Telstra, Optus and Jetstar outsource their telephone helplines — otherwise known as business process outsourcing (BPO) — to the Philippines.

In recent years, BPO has been used by global tech companies including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which have hired Filipino contractors to moderate content that is posted on these platforms.

Being bilingual in Spanish and English also presents great economic opportunities.

"One day, I overheard a colleague boasting about his friend — who is a Spanish-speaking accountant — saying that his salary is three-to-four times [greater than] what we were earning," said Cede Bersabe, a Philippines-based accountant.

"Feeling curious, I immediately browsed the internet when I went home that day.

"I searched for job opportunities for Spanish-speaking accountants and [did] indeed see many job postings with salaries similar to what my colleague said. That was a turning point."

Mr Bersabe told the ABC that ever since learning Spanish, BPO companies have been contacting him "all year round" for possible work.

Presently, he works for the Australian mining company Orica, which had quadrupled his salary from a previous job with the Canadian multinational, Manulife.

Stories, ancestry and the restoration of imperial prestige

While contemporary efforts to revitalise Spanish language teaching in the Philippines could present Madrid a chance to reset its relationship with its former colony, it also presents a chance to reframe its post-imperial legacy, according to María del Rocío Ortuño Casanova, a postdoctoral researcher of the Philippines and Spain's cultural and literary relationships at the University of Antwerp.

Spain had never realised a post-imperial bloc like the British Commonwealth or La Francophonie (a similar French equivalent), despite attempts to do so in the early 20th-century, which spoke of a pan-Hispanic identity linking together Latin America, Spain and the Philippines — known as la Hispanidad,

Dr Casanova noted that there "had been attempts to create a post-colonial contact with Spanish-speaking countries like La Francophonie or the Commonwealth", which involved creating a community under the cultural and economic leadership of Spain.

She also cited Real Instituto Elcano, a Spanish Association that in the early 2000s that published papers proposing that Spain acts as an economic "gateway" between Latin America and Asia.

For Dr Casanova, Madrid's recognition of the Philippines in the Hispanophone world has been a relatively new phenomenon, given the increased trade opportunities with one of South-East Asia's fastest-growing economies.

"Even when I did Hispanic studies in university, you didn't hear anything about the Philippines — this is a complaint that goes back to the 19th century."

This perceived invisibility of the Philippines in the Hispanic world has had significant impacts on Filipino self-perception.

While a sizeable number of Filipinos have Spanish surnames following an 1849 decree that Hispanicised Filipino surnames, chances are most people have a tenuous, or no link to Spanish ancestry.

"The notion of being perceived as Hispanic or Latin still has value — it's a source of pride," Dr Sales said.

This notion was also identified by Dr Casanova, who said Spanish had a "classy" value despite Spain's chequered history in the Philippines.

"On the one hand, if you open a shop or restaurant with a Spanish name, it gives it a flavour of being classy, but on the other hand there is this perception of the Spaniards as the killers of [national hero] José Rizal," she said.

"That has created a paradoxical perception of racial-related value together with an anti-colonial feeling."

For Dr Sales, the historically negative perceptions against Spain have affected the Philippines' origin stories which have suffered from ideologically-inflected mistranslations.

He said a case in point was a 1960s translation of the book by Dr Rizal called Noli Me Tángere (Latin for Touch Me Not), a famed Filipino work of fiction that charted the inequities of Spanish colonial rule in the late 19th century.

The translation by Leon Maria Guerrero carried anti-Spanish biases that "added layers of meaning that weren't there", Dr Sales said.

But with more of an interest in Spanish, Dr Sales said this could trigger greater consideration of Spanish-Filipino literature, which blossomed in the first half of the 20th century in retaliation to American colonial rule.

Curiously enough, this process is to begin in Antwerp in collaboration with Filipino institutions, as Dr Casanova is leading a digitisation project of early 20th-century Spanish-Filipino newspapers and periodicals, which will eventually see them translated into the Philippines' various languages and dialects.

While the project will make the historical record accessible, it will also unlock a vast archive of Spanish-Filipino literature, as publishing with newspapers and periodicals at the time was cheaper and more popular.

In time, Dr Casanova hopes the project makes accessible a vast archive of Filipino history that has been overlooked, or simply left to gather dust in libraries and archives across the Philippines.

"People do want to look at different perspectives on the same events — it's about people's stories, ancestors, villages and surnames."