The gift of language

Last autumn, while enjoying an afternoon in a forest playground with my two sons, I met another mother with 3 boys tailing her. She greeted us with an imploring smile. I was speaking to my eldest in my mother tongue, Tagalog, urging him to please keep his eyes on the ladder, lest he miss his footing and fall while climbing.

She inquired in Swiss-German, “What language are you speaking?…I ask because my husband, he is Vietnamese.” She gestured at her kids who were already busy exploring the playground.

I gave a nod and smiled. It was hard not to notice. Like my own, they had dark hair and brown eyes and, despite the 4 seasons, tanned skin all year round. They always stood out among the usually light-skinned and blue-eyed children of our small region in Switzerland.

She was intrigued at my answer. “That’s great! My husband, he also speaks only his language to our boys. It’s so important! But tell me, is Tagalog a dialect in the Philippines? I’ve never heard it before…I know a few Filipina women, but they only speak English to their children. I thought only English was spoken in the Philippines…”

A little embarrassed, I couldn’t deny that this practice was not unusual.

Growing up in a foreign country myself, where English was the formal language of learning, many of the expat families often adopted English as their language at home. To my astonishment as well, while working for an international school in the Philippines, I met not one student but a whole population of Filipino children born and raised in Manila who did not speak a word of Filipino.

When I asked one of them why, he looked at me as if I had missed the memo. “What for?!?” he exclaimed. “Everywhere you go, people always speak English!” (READ: In defense of English in the Philippines)

Understandably, for parents who have migrated overseas, it’s easier to let a child’s communication develop in the language of their adopted country. But frankly, when we allow our children to replace the language of our home with someone else’s mother tongue, regardless of where we are, how do we justify that insecurity to them?

More than teaching a language

It’s easy to blame our deeply-rooted colonial mentality for this paradox. How else would we explain it to strangers like the curious Swiss mother at the playground? She’s probably still scratching her head in disbelief.

Experts everywhere encourage parents to raise their children in their mother tongue, no matter where they may actually reside. Not only does it develop a child’s language skills, it also opens the child’s eyes to the world and its many differences.

After all, when the mother speaks, she speaks from the heart, raising her children in words and phrases that are molded by her deepest emotions, spilling out in expressions not unlike her mother before her.

She speaks it to teach not just a language, but a culture and history that surpass distance and time, regardless of how remotely detached she is from her motherland. Surely this is irreplaceable, especially with a foreign language she herself has not mastered.

It’s not unusual to meet second generation expat Filipinos in Europe who express their disappointment in adulthood after missing out on the opportunity to learn their own language throughout their childhood. (READ: Iskwelahang Pilipino: Learning Pinoy culture in Massachusetts)

Now living in my 3rd country and learning my 4th language, I’m thankful everyday that my parents insisted on raising us in Filipino, consciously preserving our language and subconsciously planting our roots. It has spared me one less frustration. (READ: 12 reasons to save the national language)

Though my Filipino still does not compare to my fluency in English, it still remains the language I speak to my parents, siblings, cousins and distant relatives, and now to my two sons as well.

It is my home language. And during the 11 years I lived in the Philippines after growing up overseas until I was 15, it was the difference that made exploring the country natural, building lasting friendships, and experiencing my own culture unfiltered.

For 3rd culture kids like me, knowing I can take that part of my heritage with me wherever I go keeps me grounded. Understanding my own language has even been key to how I have learned new ones, and taking pride in the faults and imperfections of my own culture has helped me assimilate into new cultures too.

Like the mother I met at the playground that autumn afternoon, who takes pride in the mixed cultures her children are experiencing everyday, I find my mother tongue to be such an important part of my identity that I cannot imagine denying it to my own children.

Language and memories

Living continents away from the homeland and raising a multi-lingual family, speaking to them in Filipino is like sharing a key to a secret chest of drawers.

In our everyday exchanges and whenever we read Tagalog books together, we’re opening one of those drawers and rediscovering words and phrases I forgot I knew from another life.

When my eldest points at pictures of things like “bakya” and “walis ting-ting,” asking what they are, I get so excited explaining what they’re made of and what they’re for.

The stories and conversations that sprout from them bring back memories of school vacations I spent in the Philippines, running around in flip-flops and playing with our neighbors on piles of gravel, or evenings in the bukid (farm) in our province, when my brothers and I used to catch fireflies with glass jars.

I love those conversations with my son, sharing stories and tales as he listens wide-eyed, fascinated about that world far away, where lolo and lola (grandpa and grandma) reside, living a life so different, so intriguing.

Granted, I could never teach my sons how to write books or essays in Tagalog, as I never mastered that art myself. But I hope to at least give them the ability to understand and speak the language that is more than just a window to a part of their heritage, but a door to a second home and a potential life if they would ever choose to take it. – Rappler.com 

Growing up as a child in Saudi Arabia, later as a college student in the Philippines, Cherry Malonzo now resides in Switzerland after unexpectedly meeting her husband in Rome in 2006. A mother of two boys, she is taking time off from working on stem cells and spending more time outdoors with her kids. She blogs weekly at whileinswitzerland.com.

This article first appeared in the author’s blog and is republished with her permission.