The crime of ‘pidginization’

It’s easy to understand why adherents of linguistic purity always wince at the mangling of language: The resulting pidgin version (or bastardization, take your pick) is like pirated DVD (“dibidi”) – workable, yes, but inferior in quality and illegally assembled. Of course, there’s no such thing as a pure language, strictly speaking, but we refer here to something close to it, and, in this little rambling of mine, I shall be sympathetic to the purists.

It wouldn't be hard to see why ‘pidginization’ is a crime, but how did an entire generation of the upper-middle classes become guilty of it en masse? There are two variants of this damaging phenomenon, according to Jessie Grace U. Rubrico, author of the paper The Metamorphosis of Filipino as National Language. These are the moderate Taglish and the “coñotic” Taglish. The latter is the subject of our, uh, analysis.

Konyo or conyo is a neologism that has evolved to mean ‘rich kids.’ It is a word loaded with rich subtexts: “Rich kids are not used to the sufferings of the hoi polloi.” “Rich kids talk to their parents in English.” “Rich kids are forbidden to talk in Tagalog or in any other vernacular because being an English-speaking person is a mark of success and social position.” “Rich kids are reared by devoted yayas who, unfortunately, can only speak to their wards in fractured Tagalog and English.” Conyo kids, mostly domiciled in Metro Manila, are often identified by their variant of English that introduces Tagalog words in a variety of eyebrow-raising ways.

The word konyo/conyo itself came from the vulgar Spanish coño ("cunt")—the radical shift in meaning having been lost on history. Conyo people, along with their speech, are often ridiculed in mainstream society, the constant subject of many a TV spoof. Conyo English is often formed by a phrase combining the English verb ‘make’ with the base form of a Tagalog verb. This phrase replaces perfectly acceptable English equivalents, and this is the point where the crime is committed. A classical example of conyo English is the following sentence: Let's make tusok the fishballs. (Let's pierce [onto the stick] the fishballs.)

Let us take a look at Kris Aquino as the archetypal conyo girl. Imagine her as a tempered version of "let's make tusok-tusok" Assumptionspeak and we easily come up with an ugly vision of tongues, all uniformly handicapped in both straight Tagalog and straight English. Imagine how this attack of Kris Aquino clones – our would-be businessmen, educators, media persons - realizing their handicap to be the height of cool by sheer association: coñotic Taglish = being reared by a yaya, etc. = upper socioeconomic status. Imagine all of them with their misplaced superiority - whether they’re aware of it or not, an entire army conducting its daily transactions in such a mangled yet amazingly confident manner. Imagine how the clones are proudly incapable of elegant words and proper usage in the vernacular, how they wear it as a badge of honor. And imagine how they are sure to foist their (double?) standard as the new norm on the general populace. This can only mean NOT speaking and acting conyo make you a marked man/woman for life. This can only mean the rest of young people trying hard to sound like Kris.

I bet everyone has heard President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's "make patol" sound bite. Certainly it was a phrase that came straight, neither out of the stern convent nuns’ lecture books nor from her parents, but one ultimately traceable to the schoolgirl yaya-speak she was aping? I thought that was a dangerous setting of bad example, though unintentional. It’s because the implicit message was a resounding: “If it’s good enough for the President, it’s good enough for me.” What if PGMA pursued that kind of lingo in her memos as official Malacañang policy?

The sporadic rants about how Philippine education lags behind most nations, when it was leading several decades ago, might want to point out to conyospeak as among the culprits.

The loss of the more elegant versions of the languages inevitably means the death of certain ways of in our communication (with our own and with outsiders), if not the death of an entire culture. Clarity of expression, the efficiency of communication, and the sheer beauty of being distinct and distinguished will be replaced by something gooey and amorphous, like a plate of unappetizing gruel. This bodes ill not just for the national literacy rate but for Filipino literature itself that Conrado de Quiros' quill is sure to froth at its tip. A new lingua franca may have been formed in conyospeak’s aftermath, but what about all those concepts and idioms lost? What about precision and context? Unique vocabularies? Talk about breeding mass confusion, to say nothing of an entire cultural identity lost for good.

The pidgin lingo has devolved into a situation where every rule is always accompanied by jaw-dropping exceptions. Think about the wild atrocities inflicted on syntax and diction as a result. This devolution of our diverse tongues into a bland sop is shameful, even violent, and yet it is looked upon as the height of cool. Take a look at these classic samples from Rubrico's book:

I'm so init na; make paypay me naman o. (I'm so hot; please fan me now.)
You make hintay here while I make sundo my kaibigan. (You wait here while I fetch my friend.)

In the age of globalization, pidginization may be seen as a sponge-like openness to the onslaught of useful new foreign concepts, but ironically the speakers of the new lingua franca turn out to be misfits unable to make intelligible subject-verb constructions in both English and Filipino without violating pronoun-antecedent agreement rules. And we’re talking here of leaders in every conceivable sector of society. A language straddling two kinds of tongues, both of which are evolving themselves, can only result in some kind of snafus, whether in monolingual or bilingual contexts. And who says a distinct version of the language cannot adapt itself to the pace of technological change? The French even go to the extent of ridding their French of Americanisms, but they remain the most cosmopolitan people as ever. Let us have all those nice things that come with the invasion, but, like endangered species, our native languages should be protected from such an awful bane as pidginization, or Tagalog and the rest of them Philippine languages will go the way of Latin and the dodo.

Look, we are not disparaging any sector of society here. It's not so much the problem of maids dictating the linguistic rules as much as the ruling classes' own doing, or undoing, thanks in large part to their status-consciousness. Languages die and are born in a matter of centuries. In the case of the coñotic infection, language is killed by the bullet train of contempt of one’s own heritage. The rate of language mortality today, according to a news report, has reached alarming levels. Are Filipino/Tagalog and the other Philippine languages (as we know them) next? It wouldn’t have been so agonizing a question if we saw an improved version being born and not an embarrassing corruption that coñotic has come to be.

Alas, language is essentially a function of power, and whatever the economic elite holds to be the norm becomes the norm for the rest of us.

We’ve mentioned globalization. In the eyes of language purists, this is just another form of colonization. This time, it’s neither the wrongful use of the cross nor Coca Cola that’s the culprit, but the emergence of the call center. No conquistadores were on the scene, no Yankees mouthing off dubious agendas; there’s only the inexorable march of the globalization of (un)fair trade, the “outsourcing” of (mostly) unwanted jobs to the lowest bidder abroad (dirt-cheap Third World labor – that’s us).

This time, batches and batches of newly grads are indoctrinated via accent neutralization and American pop culture trivia. (“What’s the capital of Nevada?”) The banner of a call center succinctly puts it this way: “Prom dis… to this” and the retraining of diction is supposed to be a good thing.

The colonization seems to have been thorough and complete. And yet even industry recruiters claim that they’re having a hard time hiring applicants conversant enough in English – yes, right in a country that prides itself to have placed #3 in the number of English speakers.

Thankfully, though, not everyone is happy with the invasion of the pseudo-"Valley Girl" or "Noo Yawk" accent. Certain Gen-X’ers, neo-nationalists attuned to their crystal balls, have been conscientious enough to upend the naked ‘power grab,’ by insisting to write in their respective vernaculars without shame. They bone up on the written stuff of their dead folks and set up their own respective websites. Thankfully, too, globalization has an unwitting way of favoring uniqueness in the spiral of such a soul-less culture blender. Today, to be an odd-man-out can be the new cool. With a kind of counter-culture thus espoused, pidginization is hopefully pushed back to its rightful status as a heinous crime.

(An edited version appeared in Fudge magazine, July 2005 issue)