Can Filipinos be considered native speakers of English?
THE answer to that question is yes. Filipinos are native speakers of English. While they do not use English the way the British, Americans, Australians and Canadians do in their everyday lives, Filipinos can still be considered native speakers of the language. While these people use English as their dominant or sole language, Filipinos use it alongside indigenous Philippine languages. Britons, Americans, Australians and Canadians are usually monolingual (English), but Filipinos are bilingual: English and another indigenous language. It only means the repertoire of languages Filipinos have is much bigger than the typical British, American, Australian, and Canadian.
Several months ago, I quoted Prof. Charles Mann of Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa, and the three conditions he set for being a native speaker:
Condition 1: Nurture (Childhood Language Ecology):
a. Birth and/or nurture in a macro-ecology: The native speaker needs to have been born into and/or nurtured in the relevant language macro-ecology (i.e., in the community, e.g., peers/ school/media); and/or,
b. Birth and/or nurture in a micro-ecology: The native speaker needs to have been born into and/ or nurtured in the language(s) of the relevant language microecology (i.e., at home).
Condition 2: Language dependence (linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic needs): The native speaker can carry out successfully their daily communicative acts in society and express most of their life experiences in the relevant language(s). Consequently, the native speaker uses the relevant language(s) as principal support for [his or her] thought processes and for self/group identity reference.
Condition 3: (Minimal) Oralaural language skills required: The native speaker can speak/comprehend the relevant language(s).
These conditions can be satisfactorily met by a number of Filipinos. While, indeed, Filipinos may not have grown up in an English-only environment, not even a dominantly English-only environment, they do grow up with English used frequently enough to make them native speakers of English, too. In fact, while some contexts and domains are not dominated by English, the more important ones are government, education, business, and science and technology. Therefore, Filipinos are exposed to English to a great extent and to other languages, too.
Sadly, this fact is often denied by Filipinos themselves, and often too, because of the misconception that native speakers of English are of a certain country of origin and/ or color of skin. Indeed, Filipinos have a different way of using English, which we have referred to in previous columns as “Philippine English.” As was also argued in previous columns, Philippine English is a legitimate new variety of English, as legitimate as the older ones like British English, American English, Australian English and Canadian English.
It is sad that there are still institutions that do not recognize the reality that Filipinos can also be native speakers of English. But the most unfortunate is that Filipinos themselves would not accept this fact. A large part of this is because they still have a narrowminded or even obsolete view of languages and multilingualism, that one need not be monolingual in only one language to be a native speaker of it, that one can be a native speaker of a language even if one does not use it in all contexts and domains of his or her life. Filipinos often become disadvantaged because of orientation on what or who the native speaker of English really is. They are disadvantaged in school and employment, particularly abroad, simply because they are not regarded as native speakers of English when, in fact, they really are.
Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is one of the leading scholars on English in the Philippines who is also doing pioneering work on language in the context of migration. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at 23, from De La Salle University. He has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore and Taiwan. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.