"Linguicide is Ethnocide"

 

Linguicide is Ethnocide

According to the 1987 Constitution, the national language of the Philippines is Filipino to be used as a medium of official communication and instruction in the educational system. It was not the intention of the 1987 Constitution to make all Filipinos monolingual. But the overzealous promotion of the national language by the educational system resulted in language shaming of the students whose mother tongue is not Filipino. After several decades of language shaming, many young Filipinos now do not know the mother tongue of their parents. The decreasing number of speakers of a language will slowly but surely lead to the death of that language. Since language is the expression of identity, the eradication of a language will eventually cause the extermination of ethnic identity.