'Toy napigket nga daga
Pitpitenmi nga umuna
Danggayanmi't kankanta
Takkiagmi a napigsa
Kettang ken bannogmi
dikam igingina 

     Mannamili
     Ilokano Folk Song

Aurelio Agcaoili
 

ABSTRACT

The presentation revisits the lively and dynamic exchange of discourses on the issues related to the modernization of Ilokano and refers these back to what has happened in the history of the Ilokano language, the developments of the culture, and the discourses that have affected how we have received and respected and reclaimed the Ilokano language. While the issue on reception is bound-up by the circumstances of birth, the issue on respect for the language is contentious depending on the ‘ideological and cultural’ mindset of the Ilokano in question. The crucial issue that relate to the ideal of ‘reclaiming’ the language is one of a dream, and in the diaspora, the difficulties are ever more present even if we can also say that the Ilokanos in the Philippines are not in a better position to say that they are, in fact, committed to the reclaiming of the language for themselves, for their people, and for the future generations. My hope is to offer some cursory ‘notes’, some ground to cover in the continuing and evolving discourse on what needs to be done to make Ilokano both a language of the present of the Ilokano people and a language of their future.

There have been a number of positions, voices, and attitudes and all of them are salutary. They all point to a mind that is thinking, reflecting, ruminating, and caring.

 These attitudes, voices, and positions have so much quality that we are reminded that all is not lost, that there is much relevance in this collective act to resist the onslaught of a neo-colonizing power that plans to stay forever in the minds of the many who have learned the difficult lessons about the terrible impact of ‘language and culture homogenization’—this systematic act of state power and its agents and executors to make people think only ‘mass’ thoughts, one authored by the center of power and authority. There is a bonus in these attitudes, voices, and positions: there is care, there is a caring disposition which we all see in the on-going discourse on the means and methods to modernizing Ilokano. 

______________________________

Aurelio Agcaoili, Ph.D., the Coordinator of the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, is a prolific and multi-awarded writer in Ilokano, Tagalog and English.  Visit his cybernook at http://asagcaoili.blogspot.com/.

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