BY all means, call it “Taglish” to refer to the mixture of English and Tagalog words, which many essentially middle-class Filipinos use in their conversation with fellow Filipinos. It’s not Creole English. We have not reached the stage to develop our own Creole English. It is pidgin English, to say the obvious.
What we Filipinos have is Creole Spanish. It is, spoken by nearly 700,000 people in Zamboanga City, some parts of Zamboanga provinces (Zamboanga del Sur, Zamboanga del Norte, and Zamboanga Sibugay), Cotabato, and Cavite.
The Chavacano dialect, which is spoken in the town of Ternate in Cavite could be aptly called Chavacano Portuguese because it is largely based on the Portuguese language. Ternate used to host shipyards for repair of Portuguese vessels. It employed many Portuguese shipyard workers, who, in turn, passed their language to town residents.
Chavacano Ternate is still being spoken, although their speakers are on the decline. Scholars have documented this variant dialect, although it is now almost nonexistent.
The Spaniards had shipyard repair shops in Zamboanga City, some parts of Cotabato, and even in the Manila district of Ermita, where the people there once spoke the now extant Chavacano Ermitano variant dialect.
What many Filipinos use is not yet Creole English, but it is close, according to Filipino linguists. The distinction matters because what Filipinos do is code-switching, creating what is called “Taglish” or “Englog,” or the use of combined English and Tagalog words in conversations.
A Creole is a stable, native language that has been developed from a pidgin language. Linguists said a Creole language has its grammar rules. Children speak it as their first language. Examples are Cape Verde Criolo, Haitian Creole, Jamaican Patois, among others.
When using Taglish, Filipinos merely resort to code-switching, where certain Tagalog words, which are not commonly used, are replaced by English words. Filipino broadcasters, who are not exactly proficient in both English and Tagalog languages, resort to this common practice.
Linguist said this is not an odd mixture, but it is done mainly for convenience. Because of their lack of proficiency in the two languages, the mixture is the convenient halfway solution.
This is true in the use of infinitives in Tagalog. Since almost all news programs are in Tagalog, a broadcast reporter once used the phrase “mag-ask,” when she simply meant “to ask.”
Linguists said there is hardly a Filipino child who grows up speaking Taglish. This is the first measure that Taglish has reached the level of Creole English. Taglish is essentially pidgin English, which is being used by people with insufficient mastery of either Tagalog or English languages.
What is accurate is that Filipinos have developed Filipino English, a variant of English, which uses typically Filipino idioms in their English. Hence, a Filipino would say “open the light,” when the correct way is “turn on the light.”
