Why do we need to speak Kapampangan?

For the past three days, I have argued and talked on the philosophical merits on the Kapampangan struggle for recognition. This time, I will be talking the importance of speaking the Kapampangan language.

I have been teaching for four years and I have personally witnessed how younger generations treat the Kapampangan language as an inferior language compared to the Filipino and English languages. More often than not, when one speaks Kapampangan, he is regarded as maklak buntuk (a Kapampangan idiomatic expression meaning ignorant). I cannot blame children for treating the Kapampangan language as such because this was how their environment informed their behavior towards using the l an gu age.

In an ever-increasing dominance of other foreign cultures due to globalization, Kapampangan students are pressured and forced to adapt to these changes so as to be regarded as “globally competitive students.” This adaptation process can be detrimental in such a way that it can lead to the extinction of the language itself as everybody is unconsciously busy of assimilating other languages while putting the Kapampangan language into oblivion.

This is the very reason why we should all the more enforce and implement the Mother Tongue Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy in our province. This policy refers to the implementation and use of the local languages as medium of instruction in Kindergarten to year three (K-3). According to UNESCO, children learn better in their mother tongue. In the Philippines, 60% of students are taught in mother tongue according to the research conducted by Konsonen in 2017 which was adopted by the UNESCO.

The implementation of MTB-MLE requires the utmost cooperation of parents as the use of Kapampangan language can be best proliferated in the comfort of our homes. Parents bear great responsibilities in allowing their children to speak the mother tongue. What is saddening is that many children are deprived of speaking Kapampangan because 1) it is regarded as an informal language, 2) it is a language not worthy for intellectualization and 3) it is a language of relegated to the ignorant. These biases impede the intellectualization and proliferation of the Kapampangan language.

With this, it is therefore necessary for us to strengthen our local implementation of the policy not only in our schools but first and foremost in our homes. We have to make clear that speaking Kapampangan helps us better understand our identity. With the richness of the Kapampangan language, we can better track of our needs as Kapampangan people. Rizal once spoke of the need to speak in our mother tongues, he wrote in Tagalog “ang hindi magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit sa hayop at malansang isda; kaya ating pagyamaning kusa, gaya ng inang sa atin ay nagpala.”

This why we need to speak Kapampangan. We should.