Philippine English

In this chapter, I approach English in the Philippines not as one language, but as several varieties that are used in a wide range of situations and contexts. English arrived in the country as a language transported through colonialism. Its spread was facilitated by a public education system led by young Americans who were deployed as teachers to far‐flung regions of the archipelago. The American English varieties that these teachers spoke came into contact with various Philippine lan- guages, resulting in the indigenization or nativization of English in the Philippines. This nativized variety, often referred to as “standard” or “educated” Philippine English, is the object of study of many language scholars. As English spread throughout the country, the language acquired new forms, features, and functions. It has also developed into a language of aspiration for many Filipinos. Language policies, largely disjointed and inchoate, have struggled to address the competing demands of the local and the global. In most cases, language policies persisted in promoting the “standard” English variety. What most studies and policies on English in the Philippines have continued to neglect is the fact that there are a variety of Englishes that multilingual Filipinos constantly use in a variety of situ- ations and contexts. In this chapter, I refer to these Englishes as Pinoylish – Philippine Englishes in constant flux, in continuous construction, always fluid, occupying various points in a cline of centrality and peripherality, drawing from a repertoire of local languages, including English as a Philippine mother tongue, as well as other modes of communication that shape what is meaningful to the Filipino

Entanglements of colonialism, social class, and Unequal Englishes

Recent work in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education has called for the “return” of class in the critical examination of the role of language in society and education under the organizing logic of capitalist globalization. Nevertheless, while the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic analysis is much welcome, it has also come with its own ideological erasures: the disappearance of colonialism and coloniality. Thus, this paper aims to, first, tackle the general erasure of class in intellectual movements in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades, then second, demonstrate how such erasure in fact involves the decoupling of class and colonialism through the example of the politics of Englishes in the Philippines, before introducing the concept of colonially induced Unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015; Tupas & Salonga, 2016) as a way to address directly such politics

Foregrounding Philippine Englishes in fostering linguistic equality

This article supports the standpoint of Philippine Englishes (PhEs) and discusses the sociolinguistic hierarchy in the Philippines. Using the lens of unequal Englishes, the article examines the linguistic demarcations in basic education, the domain where PhE started to evolve. It presents glimpses of unequal PhEs through illustrations from a study on how English language teaching is conducted in the context of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Policy in six public elementary schools in the Visayas and Mindanao and an analysis of the current K to 12 Curriculum in English. The findings suggest that learners have uneven access to PhEs. Amonolingual paradigm privileging Inner Circle PhEs is reflected in certain teaching practices and some elements of the English program. It is time to give PhEs a distinct place in the cradle and the apex of learning to promote linguistic equality in the country and enjoin all other sectors of society to acknowledge them