The truth is language can hide everything, even the mean intentions of a person who presents himself good-hearted to another. What is important is there is an ongoing communication. When we talk about communication we are dealing with exchanges which can utilize every medium and channel available to achieve agreement and commonality. Sometimes agreement may not be achieved, but at least, there is an understanding that matters are not settled satisfactorily between individuals. What we mean is there is an understanding that something causes a disagreement. Something or everything is not understood from some people in even better because they see at least the communication is still at the stage where interlocutors cannot be dishonest without revealing his scheme.
In our days, people find it easier to identify the cause of a problem and come up with a solution. All you need are statistics and studies. However, no matter how gritty the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data is, those who trumpet them out can not claim with al honesty that funding and working out solutions from their results will really jumpstart something that at the end will ripple out positively to our GNP and the lives of more than 70 millions Filipinos. Could it be true that other peoples, especially those who live in First World countries, do not really care how proficient we are in English but more on we as a people are regarded in the world today?
They may not give the same lame excuse on us that the reason why they would prefer overseas workers or professionals of other countries is because the latter speak better English than us. Communication is more than verbal language anyway. Could it be our image? With the decades we have been exposed to English – either through education or media – our race has already produced a dialect of English. Our comprehension and articulation of English is functional. English-speaking foreigners who visit the country can attest to the fact that will surely find their way home here than any parts of the globe because almost every Filipino can communicate with them the way they will understand. However, the problem is they are not like that when Filipinos are in their country trying to make themselves understood in English. They are not that patient with us when we are in their lands. Hence the question is "Were the English-speaking peoples (native or not) of the decades 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s more condescending to us then those in the present? If so Why?"
This discussion has nothing to do with the use of English other than to communicate with people to carry out common day-to-day activities. So much premium has been put on learning English, particularly Standard American English grammar, that young and old Filipinos have gotten to wary of rules that the natural acquisition of the language is detrimentally affected. Everybody speaks a dialect or dialects of a language. English is no exception. Perhaps some of us have to be more open mind on how the idiosyncrasies of our culture interact with the language we are wanting to speak. The thesis in this discussion is to open alternative ways to look at our problem by not necessarily pinning it with such compunction on our people’s loosening grasp of English language – or more correctly Standard American English. This does not advocate in any way that the educated of our people can can fiddle with American Standard English and still become successful in their careers. We are more concerned here in handling functionally conversational English.
English is not a property exclusively of those who strictly adhere to Standard American English. An inventor and the company who manufactures and sells it can come up with rules on how to use it. But when it is in its buyer’s hands, he can use to whatever self-serving goal he has in mind. It is the same with language. It belongs to everybody who can use it to transmit his thoughts. The person who plays the role of a listener must take the responsibility of decoding symbolic medium according not only through what he knows as the Standard English but according to the code of the speaker’s English. An interactive communication with different people and varying circumstances bring about many forms of a language. These forms are dialects. The focus that follows from here about the subject of dialect enhances the main point that other peoples’ attitudes and views on our "deteriorated" grip of Standard American English – if indeed these are really true – emanate not only from how Filipinos are currently speaking the language but more of their attitudes on us a people.
English: What’s in the name?
Social pressure exerts influence on how people communicate. The speech of people with "education", prominent jobs, and breeding is usually looked up and imitated. In time, it will acquire a high social value and adapted as a pattern. Education and the mass media serve as it propagator. Prescription, however, in linguistics is something unheard of. Thus, dialect viewed linguistically, merely means "variant" – not good, not bad, just different. One variant in any languages may reach a prestigious status. In America, the prestige dialect is called Standard English (SE). Those that vary from SE are called nonstandard. They are not deficient in forms, they are only different.
Most of the first American colonists spoke the East Midlands variety of Shakespeare’s English. Though the syntax has not changed much since the Puritans left the English shores, the contemporary British pronunciation is different from American – /klark/ for /klerk/, /laboratri/ for /laebratori/, and so on. The same happened with the British lexicon. American kerosene is British paraffin; the British call paraffin white wax. If an American in a British city asks for a cake, he will probably get a scone (rather like a sweet English muffin – for which there is no British term). Southerners do not sound like Northerners, who sound like Midwesterners. It is hard, though, to develop a wide-ranging study on Regional dialects of English in America because of its population mobile nature. Dialect leveling, comparable to the regularizing of verb forms, can be observed in the speech of the speakers of Nonstandard English dialects.
Most researchers agree that America has three major dialectic regions: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Geographically mobility, mass media, and social change precipitate dialect leveling into blustering action, rendering regional dialects less clearly defined than they used to be. This implies that someone who speaks a southern dialect may not necessarily live in the South nor has to speak a clearly definable southern dialect. Because of instability in the population and language contamination, the role of geography in defining lines of regional dialect has diminished. General regional differences, though, still play a role in the communication of people. Lexicon accentuates it. For Southerners stoop for step, porch for platform, fire dogs for andirons are some of the examples. Some of these in fact are becoming materials for scornful jokes and skits.
New terms or long-used words applied in new ways are called slang. They can be identified easily but not easy defined because slang is intimately tied to social responsibility. Some speakers of Standard English treat slang distastefully. However, a careful look at history indicates that words such as debunk, scaly, and highbrow were once slang. The distinction of slang, cant, and jargon is not always clear. Some use jargon to intentionally conceal meaning, which may pejoratively be viewed by others. To measure the amount of obscurity in a passage of prose by indicating the number of years of education required to read any passage comfortably, a Fog Index formula, i.e. 0.4(L+H), where L = the average number of words per sentence in the passage, and H = the number of hard or obscure words per 100 words in the passage, can be used.
It is said that next to regional dialects, ethnic dialects are usually spoken and used in rough humors. There is a myth that American Standard English is the pure dialect while SpanishAmerican, Italian-American, Afro-American, and Irish-American are the hybrids. Speakers of Standard English treat these dialects as materials for making fun on speakers of nonstandard English.
The second-language patterns superimpose their original-language patterns onto English, making it possible to recognize these many ethnic dialects. A speaker whose native tongue is Spanish may pronounce English words using Spanish phonemes. He may apply Spanish suprasegmentals to English morphophonemes (giving say, /Baka’son/ instead of /vei’keis
n/). They may occasionally use Spanish syntax with English words ("We no can do that here.").
There was once a notion that Black English was a corrupt and deficient form of Standard English, but research conducted has long repudiated it. Though the evidence is not that complete, Black English might have its origins in Gullah, a mixture of African languages spoken in parts of Georgia and South Carolina. Black English apparently had to build from scratch rather than be acquired from an already existent speech community. Black people who spoke many mutually unintelligible African languages would be thrown onto slave ships, unable to communicate with each other or with the white overseers. Arriving at America, the slaves eventually contrived a pidgin. Later this pidgin grew into Creole and eventually into the present-day Black English dialects.
Elision, condensation or omission of be-verb constructions and plural markers, is one characteristic of Black English. A Black English speaker would say "The going," "We cool," "I hungry," "five woman," and "seven day." Recursive constructions are also systematic. For example, two common types of relative clauses in Black English, as in Standard English, are regularly developed in two different ways. Clause 1 ("Jeannie she be a fox") and clause 2 (Jeannie drive that car") produce "Jeannie she a fox drive that car." In Standard English, it can be translated "Jeannie, who looks really good today, is driving that car." But clause 2 and clause 1 can transform to a sentence with embedding "Jeannie she be a fox drive that car." It corresponds to S.E. "Jeannie, who is driving that car, is a good-looking lady." The first sentence put the emphasis on Jeannie’s driving; the second draws attention to her foxiness, her desirability.
An endless beginning
Our problem with American English language is not that bad as it seems. It is true that there must be progress in our education program of English instruction, our schools have been teaching American Standard English older than most of the leaders of our neighboring English-crazed countries; however, we should not be poking our finger on single cause of our country’s woes. Who knows it may just be another symptom of a malignant malady. And if we insist on looking at our people’s state of command of English as a problem – without connecting it to other more pressing problems, without trying to see the whole picture of our country’s dire strait – then we have to be prepared for an endless beginning.
