ang kamatayan ng language

I don't know what the blazes it was we were supposed to be discussing in Fil today, as it was too early in the morning, but at one point we reached the subject of Filipinos nowadays having more difficulty with their own native language than with English. How ironic is that?

Apparently, Filipino is going to hell. Our instructor, in illustrating this highly sophisticated point, shared an experience she had involving a conversation between her and a German about bookstores in their respective countries. I believe it went something like this:

German: In my country, almost all of the books in our bookstores are in German. How come in yours, there are far more English books than Filipino ones?

Filipino instructor: *lost in contemplation*

I have a quick answer to that: Germans don't speak English, at least not as well as they could if English (or any other foreign language for that matter) were actually an official language in Germany. It wouldn't make any sense to have foreign books overwhelm a German bookstore, unlike here in multilingual Philippines where English is as much a national language as Filipino.

That's what I said, English is as much a national language here as Filipino. So much, in fact, that it has become an inescapable part of our identity. Can you give me the local equivalent of "cellphone?" Oops, gotcha.

Anyway, point being, as we catch up with internationalization, we also ruin the purity of our native tongue. These days it feels like everyone is thoroughly uninterested in Filipino. (Including me. Worst subject ever. But what the hell.) Nor does anyone any longer seem capable of any decent piece of writing in this fscking language.

I've always pointed out the reason for this as the difference between the Filipino being taught to us in our schools and the way we naturally speak it. Allow me to illustrate:

In English, we say it: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

We write it: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

As you can see, the way we naturally speak English is basically the same way we write it as we are taught to do. How we construct English sentences verbally transfers directly into writing, unlike in Filipino, where our natural wont is to murder the honored language of our forefathers, whilst in our classrooms we can only scratch our heads in response to the teacher's vocabulary from nowhere.

In Filipino, we say it: Nag-jump yung fox sa ibabaw nung dog.

And we write it: Aw, screw this, I give up. Whatever the bloody hell is "fox" in Filipino, anyway? Or "brown," for that matter? Ditch this stupid language.