‘Weh’

I’ve written before about August being better designated as Buwan ng mga Wikang Filipino, the month of Filipino languages, all of which contribute to a national language, Filipino.

In the academe and out, I’ve been driven to teach children, and adults, to appreciate the wealth of sounds and meaning, grammars and syntax of our languages, and to revel in linguistic dynamism, especially how young people drive most of the changes at a bewilderingly rapid, Olympian pace.

I know some of you, raising adolescents, are incredulous when I say it’s young people who are driving language. I share with you the frustration of dealing with kids walking around like zombies with headphones and whose language seems to be limited to monosyllables. That’s already giving them much credit considering their language sometimes seems limited to grunts.

The boys are the more difficult ones. I used to tell my son, give me a sentence please; but now it’s: explain that grunt — is it a yes or no or don’t know.

But linguistics is a science of listening and you, too, can take it up as a hobby, not so much learning how to speak, read, and write languages than to observe and analyze how they are used, how they develop, and what they tell us about society and people.

Derive joy when you do discover new meanings of words, or even new words, like biologists discovering a new plant or animal species (reminds me to remind you: species is both singular and plural).

I will share with you my latest, from my son who will be 16 in a few weeks.

I started picking up a new linguistic species in one of his many semi-hibernation states. I’d talk with him, watch if he was still breathing, and sigh with relief if he’d release what we call paralanguage, any kind of sound produced in the space between the oral cavity and the abdomen.

I noticed, in particular, the frequency of a particular sound which at first sounded like “eh,” coming out from the throat and then held back of a nanosecond followed by its release.

Last Sunday, I was working on the computer while my daughters were watching some Korean telenovela when I suddenly jumped and grabbed the remote, pressing pause and rewinding.

“Did you hear that,” I asked my startled daughters, “it sounds like a word your brother uses a lot.” Rewind, play. The subtitle said “why,” translating the sound “weh.”

“Does your eh, weh mean ‘why’?” I asked.

I actually never heard my daughters using this enigmatic “eh” but one of them knew the word. She had a momentary loss for words (a rare event for this daughter), then gave a tentative “It means ‘really?’ not ‘why.’” I called in my son and asked, so does your eh mean “really?” and he replied “weh.”

I was beginning to appreciate the word and its variations from “eh” to “wehhhh,” further distinguished by punctuation marks: ? or ??? or ! or !!! or ?! or none at all, all to be further broken down by prosody, the musical aspects of language.

By the end of the weekend I’d come up with these English-Filipino meanings for “weh”: Totoo? Really? Think so. Maybe. Yes. No. What?

Wow. Yes, that too.

Spelling? My kids sort of agreed “weh” but try a search on the internet with that and you won’t find anything.

That’s not all. One of my son’s friends, who is Ilokano, gave me his cryptic spelling of the word: “dobol u dobol eh.” My son frowned: “Weh! That’s wee.”

“Weh!” I proudly retorted, “Ilokanos have amazing variations in pronunciations.” Indeed, I’ve caught multiple ways of pronouncing “Wen,” which means “yes,” depending on which province the Ilokano comes from, but that’s for another Buwan ng mga Wikang Filipino article.

I’d love to hear from readers about this “weh,” especially its origin and how long it’s been in use. A colleague told me she heard it even in college, which was more than 10 years ago, leaving me distraught. How could I have missed such a monumental linguistic moment?

Weh, don’t you think this beats talking about virus variants?

mtan@inquirer.com.ph