“So Proud to Have a Language like ILOCANO”

Dogs bark, cats purr, birds chirp, and lions roar. Even animals have their beautiful language in which they can understand their own kind. So do us humans, we are blessed with a tongue that can speak, that can make such many different sounds and can express what we are feeling.

Since we were born in this world we were raised up to understanding a specific language of our own race. Let me tell you a story, in the beginning, when the God made the world, people speak in one language, people understand each other eventhough they may be speakingin other tounges or languages, maybe they can also understand animals in those days, but one day in Ancient Egypt, they wanted to build a tower that would reach the heavens and God did not want that to, people seemed so ambitious and greedy todo that. God then punished them, when they were halfway in making the tower, God had made them spoke varying languages so that they would not have good communication, so they did not finished the tower of babylon and there started in where our local languages came from.

In the 7,107 islands of the Philippines there are more than 170 ethno-linguistic groups. There are Tagalog, Ilocano, Cebuano, Bikolano, and so many to mention.

The Ilocano language is fortunate enough to boast 7 to 8 millions peakers, making it still as one of the four major languages in the country. Many Ilocano people have adopted Tagalog or English as their second and third languages but still, they have not forsaken their mother tongue. Ilocano is the medium of communicatin in homes and localities in the northern part of the country. It’s good that the language is still on the rise but we may never tell.

Some of the Ilocano teens nowadays admit it to find it hard to read Ilocano words, and many cannot even write in straight Ilocano because of the archaic grammar and the spelling. Nobody can be blamed because since childhood kids are trained to write and speak Filipino or English. Some schools don’t even permit to speak the mother tounge inside of the campus! So what’s with that? Well, that must not be. That’s a big NO! NO! Since the Ilocano Language fared better than most of the languages here we must then be so proud and let us say to the whole Philippines and the whole world that, “ Nagsayaaten iti agbalin nga taga-Ilocos, padesen niyo nga amuen ti pagsarsaritami nga Ilocano.”