Spanish language in the Philippines

thumbnail|Official copy of the "Acta de la proclamación de independencia del pueblo Filipino", the Philippine Declaration of Independence

Spanish was the sole official language of the Philippines throughout its more than three centuries of Spanish rule, from the late 16th century to 1898, then a co-official language (with English) under its American rule, a status it retained (now alongside Filipino and English) after independence in 1946. Its status was initially removed in 1973 by a constitutional change, but after a few months it was once again designated an official language by a presidential decree. However, with the adoption of the present Constitution, in 1987, Spanish became designated as an auxiliary or "optional and voluntary language".

It served as the country's first official language as proclaimed in the Malolos Constitution of the First Philippine Republic in 1899 and continued to be widely used during the first few decades of U.S. rule (1898–1946). Gradually however, the American government began promoting the use of English at the expense of Spanish, characterizing it as a negative influence of the past. By the 1920s, English became the primary language of administration and education. While it continued to serve as an official language after independence in 1946, the state of Spanish continued to decline until its removal from official status in 1973. Today, the language is no longer present in daily life and despite interest in some circles to learn or revive it, it continues to see dwindling numbers of speakers and influence. Roughly 400,000 Filipinos (less than 0.5% of the population) were estimated to be proficient in Spanish in 2020.

The Spanish language is regulated by the Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española, the main Spanish-language regulating body in the Philippines, and a member of the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, the entity which regulates the Spanish language worldwide.

Background

Overview

thumb|Flag of Spain (1785–1873 and 1875–1931)

Spanish was the language of government, education and trade throughout the three centuries of Spanish rule and continued as the country's lingua franca until the first half of the 20th century. Spanish was also the official language of the Cantonal Republic of Negros of 1898 and the Republic of Zamboanga of 1899.

While Spanish was introduced through the colonial public education system, it was never spoken on a wide scale in the Philippines. Only populations in urban areas or in places with a significant Spanish presence used the language on a daily basis or learned it as a second or third language.

Official language

Spanish remained an official language of government until a new constitution ratified on January 17, 1973, designated English and Pilipino, spelled in that draft of the constitution with a "P" instead of the more modern "F", as official languages. Shortly thereafter, Presidential Proclamation No. 155 dated March 15, 1973 ordered that the Spanish language should continue to be recognized as an official language so long as government documents in that language remained untranslated. A later constitution ratified in 1987 designated Filipino and English as official languages. Also, under this Constitution, Spanish, together with Arabic, was designated an optional and voluntary language.

Influence

There are thousands of Spanish loanwords in 170 native Philippine languages, and Spanish orthography has influenced the spelling system used for writing most of these languages.

Chavacano

Chavacano (also called Zamboangueño) is a Spanish-based creole language spoken mainly in the southern province of Zamboanga and, to a much lesser extent, in the province of Cavite in the northern region of Luzon. An estimated 689,000 people speak Chavacano. In 2010, the Instituto Cervantes de Manila estimated the number of Spanish speakers in the Philippines in the area of three million, which included the native and the non-native Chavacano and Spanish speakers.

History

Spanish colonial period

thumb|Statue of [[Miguel López de Legazpi just outside Fort San Pedro, Cebu City]]

Spanish was the language of government, education and trade throughout the three centuries (333 years) of the Philippines being part of the Spanish Empire and continued to serve as a lingua franca until the first half of the 20th century. It was first introduced to the Philippines in 1565, when the conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi founded the first Spanish settlement on the island of Cebú. The Philippines, ruled first from Mexico City and later from Madrid, was a Spanish territory for 333 years (1565–1898). Schooling was a priority, however. The Augustinians opened a school immediately upon arriving in Cebú in 1565. The Franciscans followed suit when they arrived in 1577, as did the Dominicans when they arrived in 1587. Besides religious instruction, these schools taught how to read and write and imparted industrial and agricultural techniques.

Initially, the stance of the Roman Catholic Church and its missionaries was to preach to the natives in local languages, not in Spanish. The priests learned the native languages and sometimes employed indigenous peoples as translators, creating a bilingual class known as Ladinos. Before the 19th century, few natives were taught Spanish. However, there were notable bilingual individuals such as poet-translator Gaspar Aquino de Belén. Gaspar produced Christian devotional poetry written in the Roman script in Tagalog. Pasyon is a narrative of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ begun by Gaspar Aquino de Belén, which has circulated in many versions. Later, the Spanish-Mexican ballads of chivalry, the corrido, provided a model for secular literature. Verse narratives, or komedya, were performed in the regional languages for the illiterate majority.

In the early 17th century, a Tagalog printer, Tomás Pinpin, set out to write a book in romanized phonetic script to teach the Tagalogs how to learn Castilian. His book, published by the Dominican press in which he worked, appeared in 1610, the same year as Blancas's Arte. Unlike the missionary's grammar, which Pinpin had set in type, the Tagalog native's book dealt with the language of the dominant, rather than the subordinate, other. Pinpin's book was the first such work ever written and published by a Philippine native. As such, it is richly instructive for what it tells us about the interests that animated Tagalog translation and, by implication, conversion during the early colonial period.

thumb|left|[[Juan Luna featured on the cover of a Philippine periodical in Spanish]]

By law, each town had to build two schools, one for boys and the other for girls, to teach the Spanish language and the Christian catechism. There were never enough trained teachers, however, and several provincial schools were mere sheds open to the rain. That discouraged the attendance at school, and illiteracy was high in the provinces until the 19th century, when public education was introduced. The conditions were better in larger towns. To qualify as an independent civil town, a barrio or group of barrios had to have a priest's residence, a town hall, boys' and girls' schools; streets had to be straight and at right angles to one another so that the town could grow in size; and the town had to be near a good water source and land for farming and grazing.

Better school conditions in towns and cities led to more effective instruction in the Spanish language and in other subjects. Between 1600 and 1865, a number of colleges and universities were established, which graduated many important colonial officials and church prelates, bishops, and archbishops, several of whom served the churches in Hispanic America. The increased level of education eventually led to the rise of the Ilustrados. In 1846, French traveler Jean Baptiste Mallat was surprised at how advanced Philippine schools were. El Boletín de Cebú, the first Spanish newspaper in Cebu City, was published in 1886.

In Manila, the Spanish language had been more or less widespread to the point that it has been estimated at 50% of the population knew Spanish in the late 19th century. In his 1898 book "Yesterdays in the Philippines", covering a period beginning in 1893, the American Joseph Earle Stevens, an American who resided in Manila from 1893 to 1894, wrote:

Long contact between Spanish and the local languages, Chinese dialects, and later Japanese produced a series of pidgins, known as Bamboo Spanish, and the Spanish-based creole Chavacano. At one point, they were the language of a substantial proportion of the Philippine population. Unsurprisingly, since the Philippines was administrated for centuries from New Spain in present-day Mexico, Philippine Spanish is broadly similar to Latin American Spanish not only in vocabulary but also in pronunciation and grammar.

The Spanish language was the official language used by the civil and judicial administration, and it was spoken by the majority of the population in the main cities and understood by many, especially after the passing of the Education Decree of 1863. By the end of the 19th century, Spanish was either a mother tongue or a strong second language among the educated elite of the Philippine society, having been learned in childhood either directly from parents and grandparents or in school, or through tutoring.

Schools

In the 16th and the 17th centuries, the oldest educational institutions in the country were set up by Spanish religious orders. The schools and universities played a crucial role in the development of the Spanish language in the islands. Colegio de Manila in Intramuros was founded in 1590. The Colegio formally opened in 1595, and was one of the first schools in the Philippines. In the same year, the University of San Carlos in Cebú, was established as the Colegio de San Ildefonso by the Jesuits. In 1611, the University of Santo Tomás, considered as the oldest existing university in Asia, was inaugurated in Manila by the Dominicans. In the 18th century, fluent male Spanish-speakers in the Philippines were generally the graduates of those schools or of the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán, established in 1620. In 1706, a convent school for Philippine women, Beaterios, was established. It admitted both Spanish and native girls, and taught religion, reading, writing and arithmetic with music and embroidery. Female graduates from Beaterios were fluent in Spanish as well. In 1859, Ateneo de Manila University was established by the Jesuits as the Escuela Municipal. In 1866, the total population of the Philippines was only 4,411,261. The total public schools was 841 for boys and 833 for girls and the total number of children attending the schools was 135,098 boys and 95,260 girls. In 1892, the number of schools had increased to 2,137, 1,087 of which were for boys and 1,050 for girls. The measure was at the vanguard of contemporary Asian countries and led to an important class of educated natives that sometimes continued their studies abroad, like the national hero José Rizal, who studied in Europe. That class of writers, poets and intellectuals is often referred to as Ilustrados. Ironically, it was during the initial years of American occupation in the early 20th century that Spanish literature and press flourished, partially due to the freedom of the press allowed following the transition to American rule.

Filipino nationalism and 19th-century revolutionary governments

thumb|[[Propaganda in Spanish]]

thumb|right|Early flag of the [[Philippine Revolutionary Army|Filipino revolutionaries ("Long live the Philippine Republic!"). The first two constitutions were written in Spanish.]]

Before the 19th century, Philippine revolts were small-scale. Since they did not extend beyond linguistic boundaries, they were easily neutralized by Spanish forces. With the small period of the spread of Spanish through a free public school system (1863) and the rise of an educated class, nationalists from different parts of the archipelago were able to communicate in a common language. José Rizal's novels, Graciano López Jaena's satirical articles, Marcelo H. del Pilar's anti-clerical manifestos, the bi-weekly La Solidaridad, which was published in Spain, and other materials in awakening nationalism were written in Spanish. The Philippine Revolution fought for reforms and later for independence from Spain. However, it opposed neither Spain's cultural legacy in the islands nor the Spanish language. Even Graciano López Jaena's La Solidaridad, an 1889 article that praised the young women of Malolos who petitioned to Governor-General Valeriano Weyler to open a night school to teach the Spanish language. In fact, the Malolos Congress of 1899 chose Spanish as the official language. According to Horacio de la Costa, nationalism would not have been possible without the Spanish language. The 1897 Biak-na-Bato Constitution and the 1898 Malolos Constitution were both written in Spanish. Neither specified a national language, but both recognised the continuing use of Spanish in Philippine life and legislation. Spanish was used to write the Constitution of Biak-na-Bato, Malolos Constitution, the original national anthem, Himno Nacional Filipino, as well as nationalistic propaganda material and literature.

In 1863, the Spanish language was taught freely when a primary public school system was set up for the entire population. The Spanish-speaking Ilustrados (Enlightened Ones) were the educated elite who promoted and propagated nationalism and a modern Filipino consciousness. The Ilustrados and later writers formed the basis of Philippine Classical Literature, which developed in the 19th century.

José Rizal propagated Filipino consciousness and identity in Spanish. Highly instrumental in developing nationalism were his novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo which exposed the abuses of the colonial government and clergy, composed of "Peninsulares." The novels' very own notoriety propelled its popularity even more among Filipinos. Reading them was forbidden because they exposed and parodied the Peninsulares.

Philippine–American War

The revolutionary Malolos Republic of 1899 designated the Spanish language for official use in its constitution, drawn up during the Constitutional Convention in Malolos, Bulacan. The nascent republic published a number of laws, acts, decrees, and other official issuances. They were published variously in the Spanish, English, and Tagalog, with Spanish predominating. Spanish was also designated the official language of the Cantonal Republic of Negros of 1898 and the Republic of Zamboanga of 1899.

American colonial period

thumbnail| A poster advertising the [[Jones Law (Philippines)|Jones Law of 1916 in Spanish, The Glorious Jones Law]]

thumb|[[Emilio Aguinaldo delivers a speech in Spanish (1929)]]

After the Philippine–American War and the subsequent incorporation of the Philippine archipelago to the dominion of the United States, one of the policies implemented by the new rulers was to institute the English language as the primary language of the country, designating it as the medium of instruction, with the goal of bolstering the annual increase of the number of English-speaking population in the Philippines. However, in spite of this, the Spanish language maintained its hold in the educational system, as many private educational institutions, particularly those administered by religious orders, persisted in using the Spanish language. Only after World War I did the American authorities started to press more and more for the private schools to teach in English, leading to important Catholic universities such as the Ateneo de Manila and the University of Santo Tomas to phase out Spanish in favor of English.

The census of 1903 did not inquire the respondents regarding the language they spoke and understood, but it was asked in the 1918 census, in which it was reported that from a total population of 10,314,310, the number of Filipinos capable of speaking Spanish was 757,463 (or 7.34% of the total population), with 511,721 belonging to the male population and 245,742 belonging to the female population. In contrast, the number of English-speaking Filipinos was 896,258 (or 8.69% of the total population). Greater percentage of Spanish-speaking males compared to their English-speaking counterparts were found in Zamboanga, Manila, Isabela, Cotabato, Marinduque, Cagayan, Iloilo, Cavite, Albay, Leyte, Batangas, and Sorsogon. The province with the greater percentage of Spanish-speaking females compared to their English-speaking counterparts were found in Zamboanga, Cotabato, Manila, Davao, Ambos Camarines, Iloilo, and Sorsogon. The rest of the provinces had greater percentages of English-speaking people, with the provinces of Ifugao, Bontoc, Benguet, and Kalinga registering the greatest percentage of English-speaking males. The census also affirmed that those who learned to speak Spanish or English also possessed the ability to read and write in those languages.

While the 1918 census confirmed the great boost in the position of the English language in the Philippines since the arrival of the first Thomasites, Spanish still retained its privileged position in society, as was made clear by Henry Jones Ford, a professor from Princeton who was sent to the Philippines by the then American President Woodrow Wilson for a "fact-finding mission". adding later on the following observations: