BENITO Legarda Jr. passed away just a month ago. I remember very vividly the first time I saw him. There was a conference at the end of 2009 at the Instituto Cervantes, which used to be on TM Kalaw Street. There were many Filipinos asking questions in English. Suddenly, an old man politely asked for his turn. He stood up and instead of asking a question, he started to make a few comments to the keynote speaker in Spanish. He had a wonderful Spanish accent that I had never heard before. Dr. Legarda finished his intervention by reciting, from memory, five or six verses from one of the best Filipino poets in Spanish, Cecilio Apóstol.
Needless to say, after such a sound intervention, nobody wanted to ask any more. The next person would have looked quite small, quite meaningless. There was a huge silence, and the master of ceremonies quickly realized that it was time to put an end to the event.
What I had heard for the first time was the Spanish that used to be spoken in the Philippines quite commonly a few decades ago.
Later, at the buffet, I approached Dr. Legarda just to listen to him speak again. He exchanged a few words in Spanish with another Filipino scholar who speaks the language, my friend Dr. Fernando Zialcita. I do not remember exactly how the conversation went, but at a certain point, Dr. Legarda mentioned he had in his library the 14 volumes of Fr. Juan de la Concepcion’s Historia General de Philipinas, an encyclopedic work very few scholars have read, printed in Sampaloc between 1788 and 1792.
“I do not have the books, sir,” I said humbly, “but I found the PDFs, and I expect to read all of them slowly.”
“Really?” he said with a laugh.” Good luck then!”
It was clearly a sarcastic comment. He did not believe I would ever read the 14 volumes. And after that, he left.
“This man does not know me,” I thought. “I really read a lot.”
But this is not an article about Dr. Legarda. Many people, much more qualified than me, have already written excellent obituaries.
My only point, as the title says, is that Spanish, the Filipino Spanish, the musical and original accent in which Filipinos appropriated and reshaped the language of the colonizers a long time ago until they made it their own, that specific language is going to disappear. I do not mean the Spanish language that Filipinos learn at a language school or working in a cruise ship. That might be the Spanish of Spain, the Spanish of Mexico or the Spanish of Argentina. I am referring to the language that José Rizal, Claro Recto or Manuel Quezón spoke.
Two years ago, I was kindly invited to join the Paterno family for dinner. They treated me exquisitely. The food was great and the conversation was...in Spanish! And there were at least five or six people, all of them aged more than 40, conversing naturally in Spanish. It was like traveling through time. During my 11 years in the Philippines, I have accidentally encountered Filipinos speaking the Spanish of the Philippines at Makati Medical Center, at the cashier in the supermarket, in Tuguegarao, in Romblón or at the entrance of a movie theater, but all of them were more than 50 years old.
The Philippines has, according to Ethnologue — a world catalogue of languages — more than 400,000 speakers of Spanish. However, it does not make a distinction between the Spanish from the Philippines — the native one, passed on through generations — and the Spanish that Filipinos are currently learning in order to travel, work in international organizations, migrate to the US or double their salary at a call center. That’s not Filipino Spanish.
So, Filipino Spanish is an endangered language; as endangered as many native Filipino languages spoken in the Cordilleras or in Mindanao by small ethnolinguistic groups. Families have dispersed and parents, at a certain point, decided not to pass on the language. Because this is the crucial fact: languages disappear when parents decide not to pass them on, for whatever reason, to their children.
If anyone is curious about how Filipino Spanish sounds, there are dozens of videos in YouTube. I personally find it rich, tasteful, harmonic, flavored with some Filipino words and old expressions we do not use any more in Spanish. Preserving the language depends, at this point, more on the will of the speakers than in an institutional intervention, but it would not be a bad idea to keep a sound archive in order that Filipinos might know in the future how the particular language with which Rizal defended ideas of progress for his countrymen sounded.
I do not want to end this article without mentioning that Dr. Legarda was completely right when he laughed at me: as of today, I have only partially read three volumes of those history books.