lingo

I was born in Cebu but I was not raised a Cebuano. I was raised as a Kamayo, a subgroup of the Mandaya tribe. We, however, are typical lowland people who at some point have been colonized by the Spaniards in the southeastern part of Mindanao. My grandmother was a native of the town while my grandfather was an extranjero who was a product of intermarriages of Filipinos and Spaniards. The Mandaya culture in our town is slowly forgotten now. I think it has something to do with the past influences of the foreign settlers plus the inevitable effects of neo-colonialism. But there is one thing that is preserved from my tribal roots and that is the language of the town which we call as Kinamayo or simply Kamayo. It’s a language which I can speak since my toddler years.

When I turned six, I was trained to speak Cebuano. I had to learn the language because I was sent to a La Salle school in a distant town of Cebuano-speaking people. When I entered kindergarten, I had to live in a boarding house during school days together with my ten-year old brother. With this set-up, I have to speak mostly Cebuano during weekdays and Kamayo when I went home on weekends. It would had been hard for me to converse with my Visayan classmates, if not for a summer vacation that we had in Cebu before the opening of the school. My parents told me that I was able to adjust to the vernacular in just a short period of time. But Cebuano was not the only dialect that my classmates spoke, there were also influences of Ilonggo and Tagalog. It was because of a paper company which brought people from the other islands to settle in the town. Luckily, Tagalog is no longer that new to me because my father uses this dialect during those months that he would stay with us before going back to the ship. My father was an OFW. He was not a pure Tagalog though; he spoke a different dialect called Cantilanon, (which I can also speak but not that fluently). He said that Filipino becomes the language on the ship when they are overseas.

In college, I was sent to Iligan. Although Iliganons mostly speak Cebuano, my studying became an avenue to interact with the Muslim people. I have a cousin that once studied in Marawi City and when she went home on semestral breaks she would share to us some of her recently learned Maranaw phrases. As I would be listening to her talk, the foreign words would somehow bridge the gap of Muslims and Christians, and strip down all my prejudices. Growing-up, I never had close encounters with the Muslim people and I thought that if I can learn their language then I can relate more to them and to their culture. Unfortunately, I graduated from college learning only two Maranao words- mapiya(good) and oway(yes). It was because the boarding house that I stayed in college was flocked mostly with Surigaonons and so I was more influenced with these guys from Surigao City. I can also express in their language and enjoyed borrowing some of their jolly expressions.

In my work now, I am only required to speak two languages- Java and C. Although programming languages are not meant to be spoken, in my profession I have to verbalize their syntax and semantics. Our common conversations in the class would go like-“I’ve placed an empty System.out.println already in the loop” or “Maybe you have to check if you placed an ampersand on your scanf again” or “Are you sure your class instantiation is right because your constructor and method invocations won’t work?”. I remember when I had my first lessons in programming and my professor would talk about this computer terms, then I thought to myself- he is speaking French again. Now that I’m teaching these concepts to my students, they would sometimes cast a blank look at me, as if their heads have big question marks over them and cloud callouts that write- he’s speaking gibberish again.

I can recall one of my discussions on language. With ideas from Morris Mano, I explained to my class that words are just juxtaposition of discrete elements of information that represents a quantity of information. For example, discrete elements such as letters r, e and d form the word red. Thus, a sequence of discrete elements forms a language, that is, a discipline that conveys information. That is how I defined language before and now as I look back at some parts of my life I realized that language has created a different meaning to me. It has greatly affected my decisions and lifestyle. In many times, language became either a barrier or a bridge in wherever the wind brought me.

This morning, I passed by that poster found along the corridors of the school again. It was a scholarship grant offered in Japan. I talked to my mom about it and her only advice was that I should go for it while I’m still young. It is not really on my priority list right now but I must say that I’m considering it. And so I stopped to read the poster again. The requirement section states that aside from my credentials, I have to learn Japanese.