I can function in the Philippines because I can understand Tagalog, the national language, and most people have a grasp of English. But here’s the thing, the Philippines has strong regional particularities. Over three main regions, there are countless “dialects” which are more often than not mutually unintelligible. In Cebu we speak Bisaya, the particular variety that scholars refer to as Cebuano (I’ll use these terms interchangeably). This language does not sound like Tagalog. Though I could understand Tagalog growing up, I had no idea what my mother was saying when she spoke to her cousins in Cebuano.
I know that the nation-state is a historical concept borne of 19th-century western Europe, but I find that my linguistic experience here has given me a firsthand experience of the shortcomings of the nation-state. Tagalog does not go very far in Cebu, which has pushed me to at least try to understand more Cebuano/Bisaya.
And it’s hard as hell. I’ve had my fair share of language learning over multiple linguistic families—Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, German—but nothing compares to this. I take one-on-one language classes several times a week, and after a few months I now have a rudimentary grasp of the general grammar patterns and basic phrases. I’m surrounded by the language, and I have the opportunity to speak and practice. Still, I find it extremely difficult to translate understanding into speaking.
My most practiced foreign language at this point in my life is German. Of course, any language has its formal grammar on one hand, and the way it is used in real life on the other hand. Modern standard German is one of those languages that makes an easy transition from textbooks to the real world; there are a lot of important rules that make up the language, but eventually they start to make sense and become easy to follow; when you speak with the rules that you have learned, you can communicate in a non-native, but still largely natural way.
Bisaya flies in the face of this kind of language-learning experience. For nearly every rule I learn, people say it differently in the real world.
For me, the complexity of the language lies in the many different verb forms, each one imbuing the sentence with a different subtle meaning. These forms are not conjugations; they’re prefixes and/or suffixes that attach to the main root. For example, “palit” is the verb root that means “to buy.” There are the verb forms that place emphasis on the actor (mopalit), those that emphasize the object (paliton), those that emphasize the act of transfer (ipalit), or the person who receives the object (palitan), or accidental happenings (makapalit)… the list goes on. This, I learned from a random youtube video, is called Austronesian alignment, and it is a unique feature of languages from this part of the world.
I tried my best to memorize these verb forms and to figure out which contexts to use them in. When I asked my teacher about this, she said she couldn’t really say why certain verb forms are used in certain situations. It’s a matter of feel. You just have to hear what people say and repeat it the way that they say it. And then there’s the added fact that some people just prefer to use certain verb forms, like the actor focus, and others prefer to use the object focus.
This is the kind of language that you need to be immersed in to learn. Of course, you have to do this if you want to be truly fluent in any language. But I made it through beginning and intermediate German without any real immersion experience, and I could at least construct German sentences that didn’t make me sound like an alien.
The language changes depending on where you go and with whom you speak. The urban-rural divide and the wealth gap translate into a linguistic one, too. In Cebu City, English makes up a significant part of the patchwork of sentences, whereas people from the rural provinces tend to speak a more pure Bisaya. But it’s not as if this idea of purity reigns over the language. It’s widely recognized as fluid, always changing. In fact, Bisaya changes so fast that my eighty-year-old grandparents use simple words–like chair, boyfriend–that are obsolete amongst thirty-year-olds. I guess it’s inevitable that I will speak the Bisaya of old people, albeit more broken and Americanized.
Apparently it’s become a thing to reverse words. Kapoy means tired, and the kids have taken to saying yapok. On my worst days, it feels like everyday that I learn something new, I also uncover yet another thing that I can fail miserably at.
Though I still have a hard time with this, I try my best to accept the fact that I will just sound like an alien a lot of the time. The only way to learn to speak a language is to speak it. I hate being laughed at because I’m used to being good at things, and being the one who is making the joke rather than becoming the butt of one.
Someone I admire commented, in a very neutral way, that it’s strange that I look Filipino and don’t speak any Filipino languages. My nine-year-old cousin, who was born here and recently migrated to Canada, told me that I pronounced the word for pork in a strange way. She’s a wonderful person, and despite myself I felt embarrassed and hashtag triggered by the comments of a child. Oh well. There’s no way around these things. In fact, the only way to improve my grasp of the language is by making more of these shameful errors, and in doing so coming face-to-face with being more American than Filipino.