MANILA, Philippines — Language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein became famous for saying that the limits of one’s language are the limits on one’s world. That is, to say, your experience and knowledge only go as far as you are able to express with language. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one ought remain silent, he would say—if you cannot adequately elucidate it, then you probably don’t really know it.

There is a perennial debate among writers and men of letters in the Philippines somewhat along these lines. Some of them say that Filipino writers writing in English are performing a most futile exercise, because the English language is fundamentally incompatible with the Filipino consciousness and experience.

There are concepts and ideas so deeply ingrained in the Filipino mind that have no English equivalents. Consider the classic example of rice, the staple food of the Philippines. You can have three cups of rice with one tiny hotdog.

Rice is that important to us. We have several words for it: palay, bigas, kanin, sinaing, sinangag… For every stage in the cooking of rice, we call it something. For every version of cooked rice, we have a different word. In English, there’s the word rice and… And… And… I rest my case.

Some thinkers say that this linguistic chasm posits that if we are to be faithful in our rendering of Filipino life, we ought to write in the Filipino tongue. Not to do so would be a betrayal, a bastardization of our own identity. Interestingly, Jose Rizal himself said something to this effect in the Noli Me Tangere — Spanish will never be the language of the Filipinos. Interestingly as well, Jose Rizal himself wrote the Noli in Spanish.

On the other side of the spectrum, some suggest that it is important for Filipino writers to keep writing in English, because it is through this writing in English that we are able to bring the Filipino consciousness to the attention of a greater audience.

To write only in Filipino would be self-indulgent at its worst; people ought to write to be read, to be heard, and there’s not much to be done when only preaching to the choir. By writing in English we make our language grow. It is indeed incompatible, but that is precisely where the challenge lies, and where talent comes in handy.

NVM Gonzales, who wrote some of the most Filipino-flavored short stories I have ever read in my life, is famous for saying that he “writes in Tagalog using English words.”

The language issue is so pertinent in our society because we are a colony. Not a lot of societies in the world are bilingual; the Chinese, until very recently, spoke Chinese; the Americans speak English; the French speak French.

It’s a feat in itself to have facility in more than one tongue, to be able to “code-switch” at a moment’s notice — and we’ve always admired many of our old statesman for their capacity to express themselves with passion and eloquence in both.

At first it was Spanish that was our second tongue, but thanks to the American school system, English has since become our second language — and with it, the deeply embedded idea that it is the language of our elite. Speaking in English is supposed to be an indicator of how well educated you are. But is it?

We take pride in speaking English comfortably—but just because we are comfortable with it doesn’t mean we do it well or properly. There are people who think it’s absolutely fashionable to say “here na” or “make sipa the doggie” — to the point that they even make an effort to talk like this to sound more hip.

We have fake American accents, but we can’t even get our prepositions right. We don’t know the difference between “there,” “they’re” and “their.” I mean, just check your Twitter feed. You’ll see what I mean.

The other edge of this sword is our distaste for the mother tongue, as though it were shameful to go into Starbucks and order a coffee in Filipino, as though we were inferior for calling our mothers “nanay” instead of “mom.” We laugh at people with strong regional accents, women named Vicky who call themselves Becky. We have a hard time in Filipino class and we say as much. Di marunong mag-Tagalog wow, sosyal!

But isn’t it a shameful thing that we call ourselves Filipino, that we eat off the sweat and blood of this land and can’t even tell the difference between “ng” and “nang,” that we don’t even know how to properly conjugate Filipino verbs to indicate the past tense, that we don’t know which one “manugang,” “balae,” “bayaw” and “biyenan” are in the Filipino family tree? Trying hard na tayo mag-Ingles, bobo pa tayo sa Filipino. Why is that at all fashionable?

It seems to me that by trying too hard to be good at the foreign tongue and purposely neglecting the mother tongue, we end up with a shortage of ability in both, we end up unable to express anything beyond the punctuations of “like” and “parang” — and we box ourselves in, limiting ourselves in two languages, limiting our consciousness and our world.