The English language is owned by the world and not just the natives alone. It has become a part of the culture of every country that uses it. The English language has evolved as a tool of not only communicating one’s ideas but representing one’s distinct culture. It has created a harmony of what is foreign and what is local to the person concerned. And this is what the indigenization of English is all about. What does the ‘indigenization of English’ exactly mean? How could this natural phenomenon shape the teaching of English as a second language and redirect the principles underlying the creation of language education framework in other multilingual countries?
Indigenization of English in the Philippines
The use of the English language started in the Philippines way back in the 20th century. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, English was introduced to the Filipinos by the American fleet of Admiral George Dewey. The American soldiers on off-duty were the first English Language teachers to a small group of Filipinos (Llamzon 1976). Then there were 540 American schoolteachers who arrived on the islands aboard the USS Thomas on August 21, 1901 (Gonzales and Alberca, 1978). Thus, the American colonizers founded the public school system where these Thomasites formally taught the Filipinos the English language. Moreover, English became the medium of instruction and one of the official languages of the country. Consequently, the Filipinos used English in speaking and in writing. However, there were clear indications that the way they handled English is non-native. Filipino teachers and students spoke with it in a variety of dialects mutually comprehensible but distinctly non-American. Kachru (1978) described this aspect of language change as the process of nativization. Moag (1977) and Richards (1978) called it as the indigenization of English.
Since then, Filipinos used English as their second language, that is, where English is widely used for societal interaction. Consequently, internal norms of phonology, lexicon, syntax, and speech acts are used for speech events in English, and the ‘parent’ norms of British or American English are abandoned. As a result, English has a lot of varieties and these varieties depend on how other countries use them. The Philippines is one of the countries where English has been nativized not only in their speech but also in their writings. The Filipino short story writers like Arturo B. Rotor, N.V.M. Gonzales, Hernando R. Ocampo, Consorcio Borje, Delfin Fresnosa among others expressed not only Philippine realities in English but also a consciousness and love of the truth and the beauty of life and art as pronounced by Hemmingway. Moore, an Australian professor at the University of the Philippines in the 1930’s, who strongly supported this development in the use of English declaring that the importance of literature in the country lies in its defining the Filipino image said:
The Filipino writer has to write English without becoming
an Englishman or American. He has to speak as an Englishman
but remain a Filipino … because a Filipino literature must have
its distinctive character. In so doing it may become more than
Filipino. It may become genuine literature.
The Filipinos made changes to suit their convenience in using the language and in doing so, as Gonzales (1976) aptly puts it, they emancipated themselves from American English and have taken the code for their own creative uses of the patterning of English at the lexical and syntactic levels in addition to semantic and phonological innovations. Thus evolved a new variety of English. This variety of English, as described by Kachru, is a product of the processes of which he refers to as contextualization, hybridization, and register extension.
(to be continued)
