by Prof. Elisabeth Luquin

XI

THE TEACHINg OF THE FILIPINO LANgUAgE TO FRENCH NATIONALS

by Elisabeth Luquin Head of the Filipino Section CASE67 (Center for Southeast-Asian Studies; CNRS-EHESS-INALCO) INALCO68 (National Institute for Oriental Languages and Cultures)

Anthropologists know how important it is to use one’s own language as languages are the key for mutual understanding. The Philippines chose one of its 175 Austronesian69 languages as its national language; due to the number of vernacular languages, the process was not easy after the two colonizations—Spanish and American.

In 1965, Marina Quirolgico-Pottier created the Filipino language section at the French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). INALCO offers 54 Bachelor of Arts (BA) degrees in languages such as Arab, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Russian. The faculty of South-East Asian and Pacific languages teaches all indigenous Southeast Asian languages such as Bahasa Indonesia, Burmese, Filipino, Khmer, Laotian, Thai and Vietnamese, south Pacific languages such as Drehu (New-Caledonia) and Tahitian, plus an initiation to local languages such as Cham (Vietnam) or Mon (Peninsular Southeast Asia). There are no other universities in Europe with a BA in Philippine Studies offering a complete curriculum, including language, literature, history, geography, economy and anthropology.

The Filipino language is the core BA subject, however an introduction to Cebuano and to Ilocano—the two other main languages of the archipelago—can be taken up by the students.

Let’s present the Filipino section through its students and teachers.

Every year there are around twenty students. Around ten in the 1st year, four to six in the second year and two to four in the 3rd Year. The students have different purposes in studying Filipino, partly

according to their origins: French nationals with Filipino parents (called heritage students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa), French nationals with French and Filipino parents, and students with both French parents. The latter are pursuing social or political sciences studies or business, and want to acquire basic knowledge of Filipino. The heritage students often wish to learn or improve their knowledge of their parents’ language whether those have Filipino-Tagalog as a mother tongue or not. Furthermore, many French nationals married to Filipinos enroll in Filipino classes to better communicate with their spouse and to understand the country’s culture. The section also welcomes ERASMUS70 students from Frankfurt University. Graduating INALCO students can enroll as exchange students with the University of the Philippines in Diliman, from which teachers from the Filipino department are invited to Paris.

Four teachers compose the teaching team for the BA71—one associate professor teaching Filipino grammar,72 literature and anthropology, one Filipino-Tagalog speaker teaching grammar, oral, modern texts, and sentence compositions part-time, and two parttime lecturers for the introduction to Cebuano and Ilocano.

The difficulty in learning the Filipino language for the French nationals lies on the topicalisation system of the language that makes it completely different from the French language. The grammatical subject—or topic—is moving in a Filipino sentence. It can either be the actor, the object, the beneficiary of the action, the localization or the instrument.

Though English is used by a large number of Filipinos, to communicate in their national language is worthwhile as well. The teaching of three Philippine languages as foreign languages at INALCO is a unique opportunity in France as in Europe.