Cebu lawmaker seeks revival of Spanish as subject in college

Why not revive Spanish subjects in college?

Cebu Rep. Eduardo Gullas made the suggestion yesterday in the wake of reports that call centers here receive many calls made by Spanish-speaking American customers.

He said since business process outsourcing (BPO) is a booming business, the Philippines — one of the favorite destinations of BPO contractors due to the English proficiency of its citizens — may need more college graduates with foreign language skills.

The educator-turned-lawmaker said local call centers servicing United States-based clients have been aggressively recruiting and offering premium pay jobseekers fluent in other languages, particularly Spanish.

"This is because a growing number of American customers making calls to centers here are Spanish-speaking US immigrants from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries," he said.

Gullas cited a report by IBM Corp. that over 31 million Americans, or 12 percent of the US population, speak Spanish.

"We should keep our focus on English proficiency, which is our best asset. Our English skills have enabled us to get 30 percent of outsourced information technology-related jobs. However, we should not lose sight of the need to produce graduates with multilingual skills," he said.

He said other colleges and universities could learn from the University of the Philippines, which has a full-fledged department teaching European languages.

He pointed out that next to the US, Europe is the biggest source of IT-related service jobs that are outsourced in low-wage countries like the Philippines and India.

He added that besides English, the five most commonly spoken languages in the European Union are German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch.

He stressed that young Filipinos with foreign language skills are likely to find lucrative jobs in corporations with global operations, the travel industry, diplomatic service, multilateral agencies, and those in communications technology.

"For instance, studies show that businesses worldwide are spending billions of dollars translating their websites into multiple languages," he said.