The theme for International Mother Language Day 2020 being celebrated today, Feb. 21, is “Languages without borders.” Unesco declares that at least 43 percent of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. It laments that when a language disappears, it takes with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage.
The world of deaf people, and of sign languages, is not that different. We wonder: Shall our very own Filipino Sign Language (FSL) be like the endangered sign languages of Thailand, Costa Rica, Vietnam, or the nearly-lost Hawai’ian Sign Language? Or even like our own endangered or extinct Negrito languages?
In 2004, Filipino sign linguistics researchers reported massive and abrupt changes in FSL over just two decades. Since then, the Filipino deaf community has succeeded in gaining legal recognition for FSL in the 2013 Early Years Act, and the Enhanced Basic Education Act—that FSL is the visual language of the deaf, to be used in the education of deaf children. In 2018, Republic Act No. 11106 declared FSL as the national sign language, mandating its use in education, justice, health, work, media, and all other public language domains.
These laws have snatched FSL from imminent death. But implementation difficulties faced by these laws in administration, financing, and monitoring, compounded by entrenched colonial language attitudes and bias in government, make for fragile triumphs. It is unlikely now that FSL will die or be replaced by a foreign sign language or artificial sign system. However, it may be changed so tremendously in the next decades that it could lose its indigenous features and vocabulary, and end up altogether different from its hypothesized roots in Dulag, Leyte, in the 1590s.
The University of the Philippines is taking on its legal mandate to squarely address the long neglect of this part of Filipino heritage. The UP FSL Task Force is planning to promote FSL as an academic subject, proposing the linguistics preparation of deaf leaders nationwide to train teachers of deaf learners in using FSL, and studying government procurement processes in the production of FSL educational materials. It envisions collaboration among state universities and colleges toward a national research agenda on FSL and Filipino deaf culture.
Language plays a vital role in the cultural construct of deafness and in the discourse of Deaf Studies. The concept of a Filipino deaf culture or Filipino deaf identity lags far behind. Categories of deaf people are more immediately tied to what schools or churches they attended, as these have become the geographical condition for the formation of deaf communities. This is where the deaf are often exposed to a social group for the first time, and where deaf identities are developed and sign language acquired (if not at birth). What sign language they use becomes secondary, more as a function of the school’s prescribed medium of instruction than as the true marker of their linguistic identity.
This is also critical in the greater discourse of Philippine Studies, because the identity of the Filipino (both hearing and deaf) continues to be examined and interrogated with a conscious effort to define itself in its own terms, and the Filipino deaf must find their place in it. With FSL only beginning to emerge from the shadow and imperial pressure of American Sign Language in Asia and Africa, it is actually fighting for its borders and identity.
It is true that borderlessness promotes inclusion and diversity. But at the same time, vulnerable languages and cultures are guarding and protecting their borders just to exist.
As we celebrate International Mother Language Day, let us celebrate the diversity of all the languages of the Philippines, not forgetting its endangered languages including FSL.
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Liza Martinez is a sign language linguist, and Perpi Tiongson is a Ph.D. candidate doing her dissertation on deaf identities and FSL literature.