"Tag-lish"

Being a true blooded Filipino, I admit that sometimes it makes me feel guilty not to recognize the "Tagalog" term of a certain thing.

The invasion of Americans and Spaniards brought too much influence to the evolution of language in the Philippines. And because of this, Filipinos seem to be the most easy to get adapted with their languages. Even reaching to a point of forgetting to speak our own language in straight manner. We unconsciously get to speak "taglish" if not appearing to be "konyo" individuals.

In my roaming around the blogosphere, I noticed that out of 100% Filipino bloggers, about 80% uses foreign language. While the remaining percentage are those who still advocate the use of Tagalog which is more conventional of course. Because of this fact, it simply shows that we, Filipinos, are the ones easy to learn foreign language esp. the English language. The only sad thing out of it perhaps is that, going beyond that wit, we even forget the tagalog term of a certain thing.

But of course, you don't go to the store to say, "Pabili nga ng kwaderno." But will say, "Pabili nga ng notebook." Otherwise you will appear "makata" for your straight tagalog or the one you're talking to doesn't exactly understand the term "kwaderno"...owing the fact that you are both Filipinos. We have become used to our taglish way of speaking such as "Natapos mo na ba ang homework mo?" or "Magda-drive ako mamaya."

The term "konyo", however, is a neologism that refers to the people often considered to be the children of affluent families. They are often tagged to be "sossy" in a way. Example of this is, "Let's make tusok ng fishballs". Konyo is a phrase combining the English verb "make" with the base form of the tagalog verb.

The term "cake" for example is still "keyk" in sound but only differs in spelling. This is what we call "borrowed term." The terms "mama o papa" are also what we got from the Spaniards as we address our parents. These great influences only prove that even language evolves and changes from time to time. But in spite of this, may we not forget too our national language even we have already gone far and have traveled around the globe.