Why do many Filipinos speak a mix of English and Tagalog...

 

... instead of speaking either pure Tagalog or pure English?

By: Dayang C Marikit, Philippine History Professor

First of all, there is no such thing as a "pure language".

Secondly, it’s a “class thing”… the higher you are on the social ladder, the more likely you are to “code-switch” between Filipino and English, we call these people “conyo.”

• Most of the people who are interviewed in those “Asian Boss” videos are generally “well-off” college kids who study along the “university belt” in Manila and they don’t represent everyone, I’d say that they are a “significant minority" in that location of the city.
• If they interviewed people like market vendors, street food vendors, Jeepney drivers, etc, they’d most likely get a much different result. There would be far less code-switching and it's highly unlikely for them to have a proper conversation. What I'm saying is that the demographic sample that they used in this social experiment is skewed, which then confirms their bias.

My second point is, code-switching isn’t “new,” especially for the upper classes. “Pure Tagalog” still has a lot of Malay, Javanese, Sanskrit/Indic and Chinese cognates & loan words.

• The oldest written document in the Philippines is the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, dated to be from the 10th century, and it was written with a mixture of “Old Malay, Old Javanese, Old Tagalog and Sanskrit.”
• The first word written on this document is “Swasti” a Hindu greeting that wishes people “good fortune”… this is also the word from which the term “Swastika” is derived from, this is because the swastika is a symbol of “good fortune” until the Nazis corrupted it and made it infamous as a symbol of hate… anyways, back to the point, this artifact proves that “code-switching” isn’t new.
• Lastly, even English and Spanish themselves have also adopted a lot of loanwords, from different languages such as Greek, Latin, Phoenician, Egyptian, etc.