Diyandi: Cebuano Language as Heritage

Three years ago, I talked with Jojin Pascual (who heads the History department in my university) about the need to design a program of study that would focus on Cebuano Heritage. His years of choreographing for the Sinulog festival and my years of research on Cebuano culture finally interfaced (to use a vogue term) and we did just that: design a program.

The mushrooming of festivals, the opening of a heritage clearing-house like Kabilin, the formation of the Kaguikan sa Parian, the frenzy in mapping culture, the emergence of museums both sacred and profane, the business of cultural tourism, the efforts at finding archaeological remains, the emergence of writers in Cebuano, the restoration of the churches, etc.-all tell us that Cebuanos have probably never been more conscious of their heritage as now. The answer to "Why Heritage studies?" is that we can't promote anything unless we know what it is.

With Resil Mojares glad to join us in the program, this semester we opened the Graduate Certificate in Cebuano Heritage Studies, with three courses: Resil for Cebuano Literature, Jojin for Early Cebuano History and myself for Cebuano Language.

A proven interest in local culture was a requirement for a student wanting to enroll, giving us a fine mix of students : teachers whose graduate theses were all on Cebuano culture (Hope Yu, Lilia Tio, Delilah Labajo), heritage journalists (Boboi Costas, Gavin Bagares, Dale Mansueto, Louie Nacorda), a cinematographer (Ron Henry Tan), a lover of antiques (Ben Chua) and a grandson of Bogo involved in the newest language-related enterprise of call-centering (Jason Verallo). They still have to go through the second semester and one summer to complete the program.

How does one teach something your students know already? Easy, let's look at what we think we know or want to know, they said. What the course should contain was consensual (what consenting adults do) right on. So we started, inevitably, with a review of the language itself (pronunciation, spelling, grammar and sentence patterns). We got to appreciate how daunting it is for a foreigner to learn Cebuano.

How many words can be derived from the root ka-on? Try it, you should have not less than forty in the list. Then we analyzed phonological shifts, as in: bukid - bukiran, samad - samdan, dahum - damhun, haluk - hagkan, hurut - hutdan. From our own repertory of practices, we noted the rules that as native speakers we take for granted, like the use of ha-in for asking "where"in the present tense, of di-ín in the past, and of asa in the future.

We traveled through a sea of vaguely familiar words (heard perhaps from lolo or lola) as we focused on the native vocabulary of Cebuano arts and culture. Luckily, a dictionary in this field that I have been laboring on for the past decade (with research funded by the Toyota Foundation of Japan and soon to be born with the help of the Provincial Tourism and Heritage Council) has been waiting for such an appreciative audience. So we swam through the native waters of Cebuano architecture and boat building; the practical arts (ceramics; clothing and various wear; crafts including materials, procedures and products), the decorative arts, the performance arts (entertainment - dance, music, theater - and ritual), verbal arts (language and literature) and the visual arts.

Glad that no one drowned in the process, I challenged them to write, as one of two final papers, a criticism of a literary or art object using the Cebuano vocabulary. Ben gave a nostalgic piece about a Chinese abacus that his grandfather kept, now converted into a lampshade base. Louie brought his favorite religious icon, the Patrocinio de Maria of Boljoon. Well, somewhere on this page is an example of literary criticism that the rest of the class chose to write on. Boboi's piece does not tackle a Cebuano writer, but isn't Paul Theroux more challenging?

Other talking points in class were the dialects of Cebuano, its use as lingua franca, and of course the controversy on the national language which, time and again, has pointed to Cebu as the seat of opposition. To find out what our opinion-makers thought of it, we went over a list of newspaper columns on the controversy, at the Cebuano Studies Center. Without belaboring the point, the media wrote as one (or did we miss a dissenting voice?).

What about relations of Cebuano to other areas of human concern? We talked about slang and coinages to capture the need by special groups for identity, religious language (here Louie gifted each of us with novenas he had translated into Cebuano for critiquing, which we enjoyed doing, I think), politics (of course, noting the words concocted in the Divide Cebu controversy), social class (mainly in the provincialisms off Cebu City), business and media, etc.

There was a last project. Each had to submit a list of Cebuano terms - sans loan words - in an area of human activity not covered by the arts. We hope to make available these listings for use in the classroom where trade and business, agriculture, religion, philosophy, psychology, medicine, etc. are discussed.

As we go through the program, we hope to fill in a gap, a space that will help us know better what it means to be Cebuano.