Report of the governor general of the Philippine Islands. [1908]

818 REPORT OF THE PHILIPPINE COMMISSION.
supposable ways in which a Philippine language might be produced: First, by
selecting one and suppressing all the others; second, by thoroughly fusing all
these dialects, retaining the best elements of all.
As regards the first plan, many look to the Tagalog as the ultimate Philippine
language. It has the advantage of being spoken in those provinces surrounding
the capital. It has, moreover, been most influenced by other tongues. Many
years ago it was pronounced by the great German philologist, William von Humboldt, to be the richest and most perfect of all the languages of the MalayoPolynesian family. It is, however, spoken only by 21 per cent of the Christian
inhabitants of the archipelago. The Visayan, iii its several dialects, is spoken
by more than twice as many. More than this, the Tagalog, in the capacity of
extending his territory and influence, is surpassed by several other peoples.
There is not, and there has not been for years past, any considerable expansion
of the Tagalog people into new regions. Where they are to-day, they were at
the time of the Spanish conquest, with the exception of the towns of southern
Nueva Ecija and a part of southern Zambales. But meanwhile the Visayan
peoples have had an astonishing growth. In 1735 the entire bishopric of Cebu,
embracing the islands of Samar, Leyte, Bohol, Cebu, Panay, and northern
Mindanao, yielded only 8,114 tributes, indicative of a population of less than
50,000 souls. At the opening of the nineteenth century they numbered only
300,000. In 1903 they were enumerated at over 3,000,000.a Their expansion
still goes on. They are settling up northern Mindanao, and as the present
uninhabited portions of great islands like Palawan invite settlement, it will be
the Visayans who colonize them.
On the north are extraordinary emigrants, the Ilocanos. In nearly all the
towns of Ilocos there is an annual "swarming." Whole communities move out
at once and settle in the rich valleys of the Cagayan and Magat or in the fertile
plains of Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, Tarlac, and Zambales. Here is a people
speaking a language very dissimilar from Tagalog, who will dominate northern
Luzon, if they do not already do so, down to the provinces of Pampanga and
Bulacan. It is impossible to believe that Tagalog ever will or can make progress
among the Ilocanos. On the other hand, no Filipino people is more desirous
for English instruction than the Ilocano or have better prospects of obtaining
general literacy through the public schools. In view of these conditions, I see
no chance of Tagalog becoming the language of the archipelago by the natural
ascendancy of those who now speak it.
On the other hand, the possibility of making a common language by the systematic and scientific fusing of them all seems even more visionary. Filipino
scholars interested in the development of the Tagalog language have adopted a
shortsighted policy. In a chauvinistic effort at linguistic purity, they are trying
to eject from the language all words of foreign origin and to substitute circumlocutions or words of new invention. It may be that they are following the
example of the Tagalog classical poet, Baltazar, but this is not the way in which
the great languages of the world have grown and spread. Supposing that
Englishmen of the time of Henry II had persistently cast out from the AngloFrench speech of their day every word of Norman or Latin origin, and suppose
this practice had gone on through the generations since, what would the English
language be to-day? English has grown, as every other great language has
grown, by adopting and assimilating the words of other languages. The policy
adopted by Tagalog scholars for " purifying " and perfecting their own speech
spells its ultimate sterilization and death.
Up to the end of Spanish rule the Philippine languages were growing by the
a)sorption of Spanish, and if this process had been assisted by the schools the
result would have been striking. I have before me a little compendium of the
Visayan language as it is spoken on the island of Masbate, prepared some years
ago by a young Filipino scholar. This little volume contains at a rough count
514 words, of which at least 184, or one-third, are Spanish or Spanish corruptions. Of other words are a number borrowed from the Sanskrit, Arabic, and
Chinese. The Spanish terms embrace such names as days of the week, months,
many foods, occupations, house furnishings, articles of clothing, tools, some
domestic animals, some wild animals, many vegetables, nearly all words that
relate to the schools and public buildings, and administration, all names for
foreigners, and all proper names. The words of Malayan origin include numerals, parts of the body, pronouns, nearly all birds and fishes, many natural
objects, and the verbs and adjectives with very few exceptions. This instance
may indicate that the present effort to develop the Philippine languages by
a See " History of the Population " in Philippine Census, Vol. I, pp. 439-440.