The Philippines is hit with typhoons several times a year, but the most famous of these is Haiyan, which happened last November and killed about 6,000 people. I found a Filipino news network that posts its episodes on youtube, and Ate Neneng watched it for an hour everyday to monitor the situation. Occasionally the reporters and interviewees would pepper their words with English. This is nothing new; the Philippines was in the stone age until the Spanish arrived and they absorbed foreign words for terminology they didn't have. Both Spanish and Tagalog have mesa for "table." Tagalog has both eskuwela and iskul for "school," derived from Spanish and English. But what surprised me is occasionally people interviewed would speak entirely in English. Cognates I could understand, but the entire conversation? This isn't like CNN is interviewing them. It's for a Filipino news network.

Mom and Ate Neneng represent the wide spectrum of Filipino education. Mom went to the best private schools, and today you can see her speaking English fluently without an accent. Ate Neneng went to a poor public school, and her English is... well, I think it's a testament that she can still communicate at some level. But given that there are more indigent people than wealthy, I can imagine most of the people listening to those interviews only vaguely understood what was being said.

Haiyan proved me right. Later on, many people living in the storm's path said this: The weathermen warned them of a "storm surge," but none of them knew this English term and didn't understand the threat that was headed right to them. And if officials are going on the news to explain policy and plans in English, what the hell did they think was going to happen?

I once heard that a Swedish person explaining why so many of his people are bilingual: If you're not, you can only speak Swedish, and no one else in the world speaks Swedish. Your opportunities are limited. The same goes for the Philippines. How many people know Tagalog, Waray, Tausug, or Cebuano? Even other Filipinos can't understand another island's local dialect. But the Philippines isn't Sweden. It's poor and its education system is lacking. Most people only understand their dialect or at best are bilingual in Tagalog, the national language. (Ate Neneng, who natively speaks Tagalog, doesn't know any other dialect. Mom can speak both Tagalog, which her parents knew, and Cebuano, which was spoken at the island she grew up at.) So why try to give vital information in a language most people won't understand? It's not really the time for that. Yeah, you're pushing people to learn English, but this is a life-and-death situation. That can come later. Surely you can throw out a neologism for "storm surge" or pause and explain in Tagalog what that means.