The insecurities of the alleged 'national language.'

SABBATICAL NOTES. 2 AUGUST 2014. SUNDAY.
The insecurities of the alleged 'national language.' 

WHEN A COUNTRY like the Philippines, a diverse country of various ethnolinguistic nations we must say, allots 31 days in a year to celebrate its deceptive and schizophrenic 'national language' and cause the continuing Gulag-ization of all its citizens from the nursery to the senior citizens like those Ilokanos who defend Tagalog but do not have the same passion to defend their own language and diversity, there is something wrong.

That act of the state and its agencies--the KWF plus its dancing sisters like DEPED, CHED, and TESDA--to serve as minions in this perpetuation of linguistic injustice is abominable.

The issue is simple: a state imposing its will upon a people and causing that will to erase the will of that people and have that will replaced with something else it calls 'national'.

The question is of the ontic.

The question is of the ontological.

The question is criteriological too.

And epistemic as it is epistemological as well.

It is funny that all the nation's children will wear customs to fossilize their sense of nation, make that sense only for a day--or a month if we follow the dictum of all the language fascists and dictators and hegemons of the KWF--but failing to make that substantial.

At best, the Buwan ng Wika is a facetious claim to greatness.

It is an empty rhetoric of the language Nazis who call those non-Tagalog peoples fighting for their basic right to their language 'regionalists'.

Of course, these people forget one thing: that in a diverse country like the Philippines, the backbone of the nation, the backbone of the state, the backbone of the nation state is the region.

And everywhere you go in the Philippines is a region. The nation is an illusion, a phantasmagoria.

For real.

Let's get real.

If these people know any better, it should be: THE MONTH OF PHILIPPINE LANGUAGES.

Do they ever read the international covenants on language and culture rights the Philippine signed?

WPH/