Uncertain Tongues, Decolonial Minds, and Resilient Spirits: Delineating the Tagalog Heritage Speaker

Abstract (English)

In the first Tagalog language class I attended as a student-researcher who was interested in exploring how Filipino Americans orient to the idea of “heritage language” as a site for the (re)production of racial and linguistic authenticity, our instructor, Kawagi, gave us a short lesson on the topographical features, geography, and cultural history of the Philippines. At the beginning of our first lesson, teacher and students co-constructed discourses about the Philippines as a homeland full of resilient people who had learned to adapt and persist despite the challenges Filipinos have faced throughout the centuries due to its precarious geographical location and history of repeated colonization. Kawagi’s point was the following: "If Filipinos can face these challenges, you can learn Tagalog." Kawagi, an experienced Tagalog and Filipino history and culture professor, seemed to know that we diasporic, second-generation Filipino Americans approached this task with the fear of “failing to be Filipino,” as one student confessed nervously. As many of us discussed openly in class, this failure is evidenced by the second-generation language loss that reduced us to English monolinguals as well as the more immediate performance of correctly pronouncing Tagalog words and performing basic conversational routines in class. Drawing from my ethnographic study of two Tagalog language classes, this paper explores how a pedagogical culture of “raciolinguistic authenticity” shapes Filipino Americans’ ideas about what it means to be a real Filipino. Using classroom and semiotic discourse analysis (Wortham 2005, Rampton 2007, Rymes 2016, Gal and Irvine 2019), I examine how raciolinguistic authenticity reproduces and yet transforms wider U.S. racial ideologies of diversity and multiculturalism. As racial ideologies, diversity and multiculturalism position racialized minorities within the impossible task of being both authentic (foreign language speakers) and assimilable/assimilated (monolingual English speakers). Thus, while raciolinguistic authenticity constitutes a decolonial response to white supremacy, it also reanimates racist colonial logics of difference.