‘Something new and strange': The Philippine-American War and the making of Filipino English

Abstract

This paper is premised on the assumption that contemporary Englishes of the world have a far longer historical ideological trajectory dating back to how they were imposed on subjugated peoples as part of the broader projects of colonialism. What we understand now as postcolonial Englishes can be traced back to their colonial formation as undesirable racialized varieties which prevent their speakers from becoming full-fledged modern and Westernized people, qualified to march with the rest of the enlightened world towards modernization and freedom. Thus, this paper constructs a history of ideas about Filipino English which through the years has served as a differentiating and identity-making marker for use of English among some Filipinos by drawing on texts, both official and anecdotal, produced during and after the Philippine-American War period. More specifically, it is a critical historiography of Filipino English since it does not merely map the development of ideas about it but, more importantly, in doing so it seeks to visibilize fundamental relations of colonial power grounded in the imbrication of language and race or raciolinguistic politics (Rosa & Flores, 2017).