Over my years of living in the Philippines, I have come to realize that the way Filipinos use the English language has come from many different sources. A few days ago, I came to realize something about it that I had never realized before.
Most people would think that the way the Filipinos use the English language would be American. This would be the common thought because the Philippines was a Colony of the United States for about a half of a decade. So, naturally, a person would think that those 5 decades or so of American rule over the Philippines would have greatly influenced the use of the English language in the Philippines. Really, there is a lot of truth to this, but not to the extent that I expected.
When I first moved to the Philippines, I started noticing that there was actually a lot of British influence in the use of English in the Philippines. Mostly, the spelling of words is often the British spelling rather than the American spelling. Words like “Color” have an extra letter, “u”, as in Colour, the way the British spell it. I find that in cases where British English and American English differ, the Philippines almost always uses the language in the British way. I never noticed this when I was just visiting here, I only came to realize it after I was living here. I found this surprising.
One of the reasons that this surprised me was because I never realized that the British actually controlled the Philippines for a short time. You always here the old saying that the Philippines was controlled by Spain for 400 years and by Hollywood for 50 years. Truth is, though, for 2 years, from 1762 until 1764, the British controlled the Philippines and occupied Manila. Although it is said that Spain controlled the Philippines for 400 years (nearly), the truth is that Spanish rule was interrupted for those 2 years that the British controlled the region.
I would imagine that this is the period when the British use of the English became predominant here. The British controlled the Philippines for only roughly 1/25th the amount of time that the Americans controlled the region, but I imagine that because the British use of the English language was already ingrained in the Philippine psyche, and it did not change during American rule.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, a few days ago, I came to realize something new, though. I was watching a TV show from Australia, and I quickly discovered something.
Over the years, I have noticed that while watching things like the news in the Philippines, some words are pronounced in ways that I was not expecting. Mostly, I am talking about words with an “s” in them, but the word is pronounced like an “sh” instead of an “s”. On this particular Australian show, they kept talking about a “time capsule” but they pronounced it like “time capSHule”” and after hearing that over and over again, I realized that this is how they do it in the Philippines!
I thought about how Australia would have influenced the language, because I am not aware of any time when the Aussies had control over the Philippines, but as I thought about it, I realized that Australia is probably the nearest predominantly English speaking country to the Philippines. There are always a LOT of Aussie tourists here. Being fairly “nearby” I would imagine that for hundreds of years, many Aussies would come to the Philippines, and I can only guess that because of this, they had influence over the Philippine use of the English language.
Anyway, this article is not of great significance, it is just something that came to mind as I was watching TV the other day. There are differences between British and American use of English. Differences between both countries and Australia. The Philippines seems to be a unique mix of English speaking countries peddling influence over the usage of English here!
Why are all Philippine legal documents written in English? (A judge explained it to me and I was surprised by the answer.
The centre or center. Theater or Theatre? Briton and America, divided by a common language (LOL)
Ha ha.. so true, Paul. I think that quote is from George Bernard Shaw if I remember correctly.
I have always felt that Filipino’s speak English like 1950’s America. The use of the word “mad” for instance as an Australian “mad” means crazy but in the Philippines it means angry as it does on the States. I guess Filipino English is something all their own just like every other country that uses the language.
Hi Tim – It is a real hodgepodge. Mix of using British, Aussie and American ways of saying things! 🙂
In vocabularty word choice, seems to me largely American: truck, not lorry, blanket, not rug, trunk, not boot, candy, not sweets, policeman, not constable. Same with pronunciation: LEWlenant, not LEFFtenant, alumiNUM, not aluminEEum, toMAto, not toMAHto.
That is all true.
Our British friends call it a wind screen on the car whereas I call it a windshield. I never figured how a screen would keep wind,rain,dust and bugs out of my face while driving.
Ha ha.. you got me there, I forgot that one. But I don’t recall ever hearing wind screen here in the Philippines, though.
I noticed this while installing software on various platforms. There’s a ton of English choices, including Philippine English. The standard date format in American English is mm/dd/yyyy. In Filipino English, it’s dd/mm/yyyy. As long as my banks know what I mean, I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Hi RT, I have actually noticed over the years that they use multiple date formats here. Sometimes it is mm/dd/yyyy other times it is dd/mm/yyyy. I don’t know how they keep it straight!
Interesting. The other day I was wondering why in the PHL it’s biscuits (British) instead of cookies (American).
Yes, for sure that is another example!
That is almost certainly an Aussie import, but you forgot one other major source of English for Filipinos, their proximity to Hong Kong and to a lesser extent but physically closer Malaysia and Indonesia which have British based English.
On the island of Bohol the people speak Visyan. English isn’t British or American. It’s as foreign to them as Russian is to us.
Although their limited English is a lot better than my Visyan.
Am a Filipino but we never used “colour” as spelling for “color”.
Perhaps you have not used at spelling, but I see it used all over the Philippines.
i always thought alot of filipino words were actually misspelled ,or rather spelled by phonics , american words , like sekrito for secret and “relaks” in “magrelaks” for “relax”…
like filipinos heard these english words spoken and then wrote them by sounding them out, often putting a visayan or tagalog prefix or suffix on it. Then after many years these sort of english words became ’embedded’ in languages or slang here.
Many words they think belong to them,like when i said “blah-blah-blah” to my wife she wondered who taught me this “filipino phrase” LoL