A Comprehensive Filipino Language: A Bane or a Boon?

Residing in a multicultural and multilingual country like the Philippines exposes us to a wide array of dialects and variations in language. Making the Filipino language as comprehensive and inclusive as possible has been a common advocacy of the state and other sectors in society. But is this really what our country needs?

Incorporating other languages in the corpus of the national language introduces big linguistic issues in the discourse of people. A study conducted by Hicham Dahmani (2013) entitled The Effects of Multilingualism on Education (accessible through www.moroccoworldnews.com), “the diversity of languages that exist in Morocco comes with big issues, which are code-switching, code mixing”. Despite the study being conducted in Morocco, I believe it’s applicable to Philippine society as well. Furthermore, multilingualism may widen the gap between the rich and the poor as only those who could afford quality education are able to avail of multilingual classes.

In this regard, multilingualism proves to be more of a bane than a boon to society and should not be championed.