Motherless Tongues: The insurgency of language amid wars of translation by Vicente L. Rafael

Linguistic Policies, Ideologies, and Inequalities: Contextualizing and Resisting Sociolinguistic Inequalities in Philippine Museum Linguistic Landscapes

“…This paper investigated the ways in which English came to be institutionalized in the Philippines through the American-led public school system and how this educational-colonial system has given birth to an unequal social and power dynamics between English and Filipino, the national language (Rafael, 2016;Schueller, 2021).…”

“…These Pensionados-along with the educated and elite classes of Philippine society who were also understandably proficient in English-came to use their privileged position to accord the language its own special social status, since designating it as prestigious also marked them as such. And even more so, sharing this (linguistic) link with their American colonial masters not only showed their loyalty to the colonial government and the "homeland", but it also granted them favors and socio-political positions which would otherwise be gatekept from non-English-speaking Filipinos (Rafael, 2016;Ileto, 2017;Tupas, 2004). Opportunities for socioeconomic advancement during the American colonial period and postcolonial period were therefore limited to a select few, most of which were already privileged to begin with.…”

“…By and large, English came to be used and institutionalized as the sole MOI in basic and higher education institutions during the early half of the 20 th century when the Philippines was under American colonial rule. The Philippine education system, however, was overhauled at the turn of the 21 st century thanks, in part, to the rise of linguistic nationalism in the 1930s as seen in the establishment of INL and Tagalog as the national language in 1937 as well as the Philippines' political independence from its American colonizers in 1946 (Rafael, 2016;Schueller, 2021). And evidently so, we can see how these sociopolitical events that transpired during the pre-and post-WWII periods have influenced how we situate English and Filipino as two important (albeit conflicting) languages in the educational and pedagogical sphere; the dynamics of which informed the institutionalization of a bilingual education program in 1974.…”

Arundhati Roy in Thai : compromising the linguistic hybridity in translation

“…Chittiphalangsri (2014) returns to the concept of Orientalism and sees postcolonial translation as a process in which virtue and power are negotiated to obtain the position of Western legitimacy in representing the East. Rafael (2016) explores the concept of mother tongues in the postcolonial Philippines in the contexts of revolution, war, and societal development.…”