An Italian-British colleague of mine remarked that Filipino sounded Italian after listening to my conversation with another Filipino colleague. I said we have so many Spanish loan words and pronunciation that sometimes we do sound Italian or Portuguese. We used to have compulsory Spanish subjects until college but that was removed during my generation. It was just an elective when I entered college in the late 1990s.

So we do still use Spanish/Spanish loan words in everyday life. I tell time and count in Spanish. Household items and house parts are in Spanish e.g. abre-lata, plato, platito. I do use pero, por que, and que horrible quite a lot.

Chavacano is more Spanish than any language in the Philippines but that is pidgin Spanish that uses Bisaya grammar. I watched a video about some Spaniards from Spain who tried talking to Cavite Chavacano speakers and Zamboanga Chavacano speakers. They still couldn’t understand them completely but somehow but they could get the gist of what the Filipino Chavacano speakers were saying.

I tried learning the language on my own by watching soaps but damn, I didn’t realize Mexican or Latin American Spanish is completely different from Spain Spanish. Filipino Spanish is more related to Latin American Spanish, more precisely Mexican Spanish, since we were governed by Spain through Mexico for 333 years. I decided I should just learn the language formally by enrolling in Instituto Cervantes because it’s hard. The grammar is more related to French and Italian (hence the term Latin languages) than the Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Germanic) so it twisted my brain a bit. Learning the words is easy since we do have a lot of loan words but grammar is tough. The feminine/masculine part of the language—it’s a hard concept to remember because Filipino languages are genderless. Even before wokeness became a thing, Austronesian languages (like Malay) are already genderless. Our pronouns are genderless.

During the First Vatican, Catholic masses are in Latin. My parents heard mass, especially high ones (i.e. Advent), in Latin. This is the reason why many Filipinos are just religious but do not understand the meaning behind so many things in Catholicism—it’s because the language is not understandable. The mass became in English or Filipino under the Second Vatican, which pissed off the conservatives. But my mom still prays the novena in Latin/Spanish and I really don’t know if she fully understood it. This requires a whole different blog entry so I leave this for now.

So yeah, this video about Philippine Spanish vs Spain Spanish is funny. You would think we would be able to understand Spaniards but we really wouldn’t. But at least half of the battle is won since we can pronounce Spanish words easily unlike monolingual Americans who mangle Spanish words.

¿Intiende?