In the last decade, there has been a surge of linguistic landscape studies conducted in the Philippines using varying theoretical and methodological approaches. Local studies, for example, have intersected linguistic landscapes with gender and sexuality, political identity construction and positioning, heritage tourism, language politics and memory studies. While the sociolinguistic subdiscipline is still in its nascent stage, its breadth and diversity of study locales hint at a potentially fruitful field of interest in the country. However, what exactly are the recurrent themes in Philippine linguistic landscape studies? What are the methodological trends that underpin these? And, finally, how can linguistic landscape studies in the country better reflect Philippine social realities and experiences? In this article, I attempt to answer these questions by mapping out the current themes and trends in Philippine linguistic landscape studies.
War – destructive and bloody as it may be – has nevertheless been discursively framed as a valiant and noble deed by powerful state institutions and forces through political speeches and legislature. In recent years, however, the multimodal turn in critical discourse analysis saw the rise of war studies through the lens of war monuments and how these selectively frame war as a social practice. Using Abousnnouga and Machin’s three-dimensional social semiotics framework, this paper explores how semiotic resources employed in the Marawi Siege monument in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery), Philippines, recontextualize the Marawi Siege by recontextualizing representations of government forces from violent contexts and situating them instead in sanitised contexts of humanitarian work – all the while (visually) silencing the plight of the Maranao people during the Siege. It further revealed that semiotic resources were used to weave a particular frame of narrative in the discourse of war through the celebratory, symbolic, and somewhat propagandistic narrative of the government and military, all of which may have been employed in order to support and provide evidence for its own institutional legitimacy and power.
This paper interrogates the notion of “correct English” in the Philippines by looking at its colonial genealogy and historical entrenchment and by situating it as an epistemic construct produced through American imperial education, specifically through one of the key tools of mass subjugation: the colonial English textbook. Focusing on English Fundamentals for Filipino Students (1932) by Jaranilla, Potts, and Manalo as a case study, I argue that such texts functioned as mechanisms of colonial control and social engineering (May, 1984), one that is mediated through “proper” language use and the subsequent naturalization of American English as the normative standard of English in the country. Furthermore, through a discourse-historical reading of this textbook, I also trace how categories of “correct” and “incorrect” English were mobilized to index and sustain colonially induced hierarchies of race, knowledge, and civility. Such pedagogical measures, in effect, revealed how the colonial English textbook operationalized systems of exclusion to codify the American variety as the legitimate and “correct” English, thereby demonstrating that “language correctness” in the Philippines is not merely a pedagogical convention but a colonial formation embedded in broader regimes of epistemic power.
In Decoloniality and language scholarship – a critical intervention, Rambukwella and Zavala identify three emerging challenges in the ongoing theorization and application of the term ‘decoloniality’ in current language scholarship: the assertion of an alterity untouched by modernity, the creation of new binaries despite efforts to deconstruct them, and the decontextualization and depoliticization of decoloniality. In this response article, we look into how these challenges play out in the Philippine context. Examining our own engagements with decolonial thinking and practice in academic circles in the country with particular focus on the field of English language scholarship, we find the same problematic trends and tendencies, while also observing that there are specific iterations of these issues in Philippine academia and in contemporary decolonial campaigns initiated outside of the academe. It is important to note that while decolonial thinking and efforts are not new in Philippine academic conversations and in the popular imagination, it remains a new, or perhaps an under-studied or under-utilized, approach and practice in applied/sociolinguistic scholarship, especially as it concerns English. With this broad comparison in mind, our response to the article is divided into three sections. In the first section, we provide a brief historicization of the trajectory of decolonial thinking in the academe after the second world war, right after the Philippines was granted independence by the United States in 1946. In the second section, we focus on English language scholarship and trace the developments in the field, underscoring what we have observed as a movement from a postcolonial position towards a path that offers more possibilities for decolonization. In the third and final section, we end with the idea of wariness as a useful emotion and disposition with which to make sense of the present decolonial moment that we are experiencing. This wariness has allowed us to, first, examine our own fraught position as English teachers and scholars and the tensions this creates in our attempts at decolonizing English Studies in the country; and second, recognize possibilities of decolonial and decolonizing thought, acts, and practices that are not so named but do the work of such. We call these unnamed decolonialities. Overall, we believe that the decolonial project in the field of English language scholarship can only be an ever-continuing and ever-evolving one as the project of disrupting existing and emerging power structures associated with the teaching and study of English in the Philippines in the hope of replacing them with more equitable and socially just ones never ends.
This study unsettles and complicates our understanding of the language provisions stipulated in the 1987 Philippine Constitution, specifically Article XIV, sections 6–9, by looking underneath its surface and calling into question the unequal and racialized (post)colonial matrices and relations of power that had informed its drafting and development during the 1986 Philippine Constitutional Commission. Through a critical discursive and historiographical perspective, I argued that conditions of coloniality were articulated during the language provision deliberations of the Commission and were mobilized on two axes, namely, the racialization of language through imperial amnesia and the conflation of neoliberal and linguistic entrepreneurial discourses, both of which perpetuate the effects and legacies of colonialism on language policy-making, teaching, and education even after the period of formal colonization.
