BY DR. JOSE MA. EDUARDO P. DACUDAO
“WHEN you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It’s like dropping a bomb on a museum.” (A saying by Kenneth Hale, who taught Linguistics at MIT)
When I first came to work in Butuan, I immediately found out that at least 90% of its residents are native Cebuano speakers. Thus I got a displeasing shock when I first passed by the intersection of its main highways located in the middle of the city one late afternoon.
A small ‘Christian’ group was there loudly preaching in Tagalog.
Religious groups who evangelized in a foreign tongue are of particular threat to indigenous traditional languages. Why? Because the social norms of their native language speaking converts change. First, these indigenous traditional languages lose social prestige, their speakers becoming second class citizens in their new religious community whenever they use their native languages. Next, having been relegated to a minority social status, these languages die out as parents prefer to pass on their new religion’s commonly used language to their offspring.
Such groups, if they do not restrain themselves, tend to turn their converts into ethnic traitors.
The group mentioned above claim to be ‘Christians’ and adhere to the teachings of the New Testament, which they keep on quoting. Is Christianity then hostile to native languages?
Consider what the New Testament has to say.
“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues… When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language… We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” (Acts 2:4-11)
Taken literally, this passage has always been taken by Christians as a miracle. Some Christian groups have even been founded that focus on the attempted reenactment of this passage. Speaking in tongues, a miracle, a sign from God!
What is also clear from this passage, although often forgotten, is that the apostles evangelized, right at the beginning, in the languages of their listeners, as directed by God the Holy Spirit who descended upon them and filled them. And here is the clear implication that has often been left out in many Christian theologies.
God encouraged the apostles, in the most direct of ways, to use the languages of the world. They had no choice, as the Spirit of God possessed them.
Now why would God do that? Just what are the languages of the world?
The languages of the world are His creations. Each language of the world in general also defines an ethnolinguistic people, namely the people that speaks that particular language. No man has created a naturally occurring language or the people that it defines. They are as naturally occurring as the birds and the beasts, and the flora that gives Creation goodness, meaning, and beauty.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Gen 1:31) (To be continued)/PN
