Ako'y Fil-Am....Bilingual.

According to the far-reaching study from the Pew Research Center, Asian-Americans for the first time have surpassed Hispanics as the fastest-growing immigrant group in the United States. As of 2010, 36 percent of immigrants arriving in the U.S. are Asian, according to Census data, while just 31 percent are Hispanic.

As of the 2010 Census there are 3.4 million Filipino Americans, including Multiracial Americans who are part Filipino, with the United States Department of State in 2011 estimating the population at 4 million.

Filipino Americans are the second largest population of Asian Americans (next to Chinese Americans) and the largest population of Overseas Filipinos. First recorded presence of Filipinos in what is now the United States date to October 1587, with the first permanent settlement of Filipinos being established in Louisiana in 1763. Some documents point out that one of the founders of present day City of Los Angeles, CA was from the Philippines, Antonio Miranda Rodriguez Poblador. He was sent by the Spanish government in Mexico along with 44 others in 1781 to establish a settlement. Since then significant populations of Filipino Americans can be found in California, Hawaii, the New York metropolitan area, and Illinois. There are smaller populations of Filipino Americans elsewhere.

All these is great to know especially when viewed with the "strength in numbers" context in mind. However it's a sad albeit a common perception that Filipinos in the U.S. are one of the most if not the most fragmented  ethnic group in the country. Common school of thought blame our archipelagic geography which naturally reinforced regionalism and evolution of hundreds of dialects thus creating numerous ethnolinguistic groups. This made it quite easier for both Spain and the U.S. to implement the basic tenet of Colonization 101 i.e. to skip the "divide" part and jump to the "conquer" part but that's another blog post altogether.

Dissecting, debating and analyzing our "cultural weakness" ad nauseam could be a a very engaging exercise especially over bottles of San Miguel and sizzling sisig. However at the end of the day, a couple of questions remain. What have we learned and what are we going to do about it? Perhaps a great place to start is teaching the first generation of Fil-Ams to speak Filipino and encourage them to be bilingual. It is sad to note that most Americans with Filipino ancestry don't speak Filipino. It is quite understandable that majority of the descendants of earlier immigrants from the Philippines from the early 20th century until the last mass wave of the 60's and the early 70's were not taught the language. Primary reason is for "ease" of assimilation and secondly, Pilipino, which is largely based from Tagalog was not as widely spoken by all Filipinos prior to the advent of mass electrification (think t.v., internet, etc.) which exposed those living in far flung areas to "imperial" Manila's mass media programs which used Tagalog or Pilipino as the medium of communication.

Presently, it's hard to believe that there are still new immigrants coming to the U.S. that don't speak Filipino. However the belief that their children will be better off just speaking English is still prevalent. Somehow the misperception that the children will have a hard time in school and be "confused" still prevail.  Does it mean that those who were born and raised in the Philippines are more "intelligent" for being bilingual or trilingual or even quadrilingual if one considers the dialects spoken by those from non-tagalog regions? This makes Rizal even more amazing considering he either mastered or at least to a varying degree, conversant in 22 languages. A certified Polyglot indeed!


According to the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA), there are various phenomena which can masquerade as deficit arising from bilingualism; however, the recommended approach is actually REINFORCEMENT of both languages (and cultures, as the case may be) and NOT EXCLUSION of one or the other.  Interestingly, it states that " Children all over the world learn more than one language without developing speech or language problems.  Bilingual children develop language skills just as other children do. A study done on German-English bilingual toddlers and published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology in 2002 comes to the conclusion that "early simultaneous acquisition of more than one language is not an inherent disadvantage for the child."

The truth is that teaching a second language can be BENEFICIAL.  According to an article in the Linguistic Society of America's website, "Some people worry that learning more than one language is bad for a child, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there are a lot of advantages to knowing more than one language."  They then go on to say that bilingualism can ENHANCE cognitive development, IMPROVE the development of a child's cultural identity, and ENCOURAGE cross-cultural awareness and understanding.

Tragically, many Filipino-American children grow to resent the fact that their parents never taught them Filipino while growing up - regardless of the noble reasons the parents had.  It makes many of them feel isolated from their ethnic roots and wish that their parents had shown more foresight when they were younger.  Some try to learn the language later on, and while this is laudable, it is often a humongous task because the damage has already been done; the more you wait to learn a new language, the harder it is.

So let's make the census statistics really count and take advantage of our growing number and start mending our "cultural weakness" by raising bilingual kids who will grow up more attached to their roots and a stronger sense of cultural identity and unity. Hopefully one day everyone can proudly claim..........Fil-Am ako...Bilingual!.













Sources:

1) en.wikipedia.org
2) New York Times
3) CBS New
4) PewSocialTrends.org
5) Dugyotblogspot.com
6) Kevin Ofrancia / http://twitpic.com/2goyz8