Come Again? What Did You Said?

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the American occupation of the Philippines is the dominance of the English language. It is one of the country’s official languages, and most Filipinos claim to speak it, albeit with varying degrees of fluency, which automatically makes it a socio-economic marker. And then there’s the accent, which snobs like to pounce on as a further indicator of class and regionality, with the “Manila” accent and diction considered the benchmark that separates the elites from the plebs, the urbanites from the provincials. But why do we make such a big deal about accents, and look down upon those who twist and mangle the English language, not to mention the non-Tagalog speakers who can’t quite shed their Visayan accents when they converse in Filipino? We ask FEU Professor Dennis H. Pulido, who has a PhD in Linguistics, Chris Upton, president of John Robert Powers, and writer, editor and entrepreneur Apa Ongpin if accents do matter, or are we still trying to be little brown Americans?