Despite the reality that the southern Luzon dialect Tagalog is not as widely-spoken across the Philippine archipelago as most Filipinos would like to believe, President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III is pressing on with its use in the delivery of today's State of the Nation Address (SONA) in a joint session of Congress which will include members of the diplomatic corps. Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Herminio “Sonny” Coloma took effots to assure non-Tagalog speakers that facilities will be available for them.Coloma earlier announced P-Noy would deliver an all-Tagalog SONA. For the benefit of non-Tagalog speakers, especially the members of the diplomatic corps, Coloma hastily added, headsets for the English translation of the SONA would be distributed to those attending at the Batasan. He, however, failed to say if English translation would also be provided for those who would just watch the proceedings on TV by way of sub-titles.
Even then, this presents communication inefficiencies that could have been preventable simply by delivering this address in English as had always been the tradition.
Here's a comment I made on Facebook, but it's a darn good one, so I'll repeat it:
ReplyDeleteGMA, despite having a speaking voice that sounds like a cat being sanded, used to do a pretty good job. Mix it up a bit. Look, it's mainly a report to the nation from its President, so certainly he should speak in a manner which as much of his audience as possible can understand. But this kind of speech also has a large external audience. Delivering it strictly in the native language is a signal from him that he has no message he wants to give the Philippines' regional neighbors, the world at large, or potential investors.
I agree, save for one detail.
ReplyDeleteThe term dialect to refer to Tagalog is disparaging, racist, and plain INCORRECT. Please change it to LANGUAGE. Any linguist worth his salt will tell you that it IS.