Ingles

Ingles

Among the various titles Estrella Alfon could have bestowed upon her work, she chose the single word “English”. It is striking in its shortness and ability to encapsulate and address the heart of the story’s theme, because that one word carries with it such a wealth of connotations and cultural expectations.

First of all, the title serves as a lead in to the idea of a bilingual society. Fluency in English is among the most obvious and prevalent of distinguishing factors when it comes to social class. In the Philippines, it has become the norm that an educated person knows how to speak in both English and the vernacular. It has become commonplace that a command of the English language sets one apart in terms of social standing. It is among the criteria that Filipinos refer to when they consign you to a certain station in life, among such universal and timeless means of exclusion and segregation as skin color. This is the reason why Marco feels compelled to learn English as a way to climb the rungs of the social ladder, if you will.

But this type of mindset finds its roots in colonial mentality. Colonial mentality is that mistaken and insidious belief that anything foreign is immediately and unquestionably better than our own. Language is simply an easy distinguishing marker that can be used as a means of segregation among social and economic classes. We see proof that Marco thinks very highly of the Americans, a fact that would help explain his passionate desire to learn English.

Because of our history as a colony, we may say that the Philippines as we know it is born from two different worlds, and is a merging or a blending of these two disparate entities into a single reality. This is evident in the short story.

Marco is from Cebu, or at the very least is a speaker of the Visayan dialect. This can be deduced from the language that he uses in the story. His son says “Pa, this is plate, this is table, and this is water, unsa no?”, and the word...