World Englishes, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 4758, 2004.

08832919

The politics of Philippine English:

neocolonialism, global politics, and the problem of postcolonialism
T. RUANNI F. TUPAS*

ABSTRACT: This paper deals with the politics of Philippine English. For more than three decades now,
Filipino scholars have argued for the legitimacy of this variety of English in the country. Studies of
Philippine English, however, have so far failed to consider the fact that a self-determining variety of
English is deployed across structures of unfreedom in the midst of neocolonial and global political realities.
Scholars need to democratize studies on Philippine English to include `non-standard' uses of Philippine
English spoken by a majority of Filipinos, and to consider its neocolonial moorings. This recognition of
political weakness offers renewed possibilities of resistance and situated agency for Filipino speakers with
whom scholars of language may consolidate their energies towards social action and change.

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is to address one crucial aspect of Philippine English which has
so far been largely neglected in the field: its politics. Philippine English is one of a
constellation of world Englishes which, in recent years, has caused major shockwaves in
the world of sociolinguistics and in many areas of applied linguistics. I locate my analysis
in the theoretical paradigm within which world Englishes are justified, and then move to
discuss the political dimensions of such a framework in relation to political and historical
experiences of Filipinos. In doing so, I hope to push studies on Philippine English beyond
their present concerns and into a reconceptualization of the very nature of Philippine
English itself in order to give it renewed strengths in the midst of `historical unfreedom and
existential finitude' (Hau, 1998: 21).

THE CONTEXT OF PHILIPPINE ENGLISH

Since the mid-twentieth century, amid the processes of decolonization which emerged
after erstwhile colonized nations `gained' their independence, new justifications for the
continued use of colonial languages, mainly English, have also emerged. An interesting
slant to this tendency has also been an equally justifiable use of the modern linguistic
paradigm to treat all languages as equal and veer away from seemingly racially-induced
discussions of language premised on the belief that particular languages were better than
others by virtue of the fact that they were spoken by white, thus superior, races. According
to Hymes (1985), `The functional equality of all languages has been a tenet of the faith
from the founders of structural linguistics to most practitioners of linguistics today . . . '. It
`has been a progressive force' that paved the way for the `appreciation of the marvelous
variety of forms taken by human linguistic creativity' (p. v).
* Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent,
Singapore 119260. E-mail: [email protected]
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T. Ruanni F. Tupas

In post-independence or post-imperial eras of many countries, this ideology of linguistic

diversity finds clear political expression in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin's (1989) important
book on post-colonial theory entitled The Empire Writes Back, which supports a linguistics
for `marginal' or marginalized language practices of the colonized (pp. 456). This means
de-centering the imperial norms of the English language through the processes of
appropriation and abrogation, thus resulting in and reflecting indigenized varieties of
English in formerly colonized societies. The varieties, then, become the proud bearers of
non-Western cultures and histories and the conduits through which nationalist voices and
struggles are expressed. This is the theoretical impetus behind the current dominant
paradigm of world Englishes, vigorously promoted by Braj Kachru (e.g., 1983, 1986,
1997a, 1997b) and by journals like World Englishes, English Today, and English WorldWide, with which studies on Philippine English are likewise theoretically and ideologically
allied. Thus, `the empire not only ``talked'' back but it ``wrote'' back!' (Kachru, 1997a: 19).
Nevertheless, Mazrui (1998) warns us against complacency about the ideology of
linguistic diversity because it is deployed under a politico-economic global order that is
anathema to genuine forms of cultural diversity or polycentricity. While this ideology
presupposes that all languages and varieties are equal, in reality, they are not. Our
examination of Philippine English, then, forces us to see the wide theoretical cleavage
between its ontology and the context within which it has emerged. On the one hand,
Philippine English is assigned a `post-colonial role' while, on the other hand, it appears in a
highly neocolonial period where conditions of life and expression are largely beyond the
control of the majority of the Filipino people. There is a stark discrepancy here between
the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of unfreedom, a matter almost completely ignored
by studies in this subject area for more than three decades now. Avowedly positivist in
orientation, such studies have comfortably shied away from the politics of Philippine
English, perhaps thus helping perpetuate the structures of inequality within which such a
variety of English would have found a powerful voice of resistance and difference.
STUDIES ON PHILIPPINE ENGLISH

The first systematic attempt to describe the unique features of English language use by
Filipinos was undertaken by Llamzon (1969) in the book Standard Filipino English.
Llamzon's thesis that `there is a standard variety of English which has arisen in the
Philippines' (p. 84) was, Bautista (2000a: 6) claims, `truly radical at that time' and,
according to Gonzalez (1998: 115), `the first of its kind in this part of the world and
certainly in the Philippines'. Llamzon's work focuses on a description of the phonology of
Philippine English and a preliminary listing of its grammatical features (including
`Filipinisms') based on a series of experiments of acceptability and correctness with both
native and Filipino speakers of English in order to identify standardized structural features
of the language unique to Filipino speakers. According to Llamzon (2000: 139), `I wrote
the book on Filipino English, because when I came back to the Philippines after some
fifteen years of study in the US, I was struck by the differences in the way Americans and
Filipinos spoke English.' Through the precision of tools of modern linguistics, Llamzon
(1969) pointed to the emergence of a Filipino variety of English that was potentially
systematic, rule-governed, and legitimate.
For the past 30 years since the publication of the landmark work, several studies on the
topic have further bolstered the case for Philippine English. According to Tay (1991: 323),
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the `Philippines has perhaps produced the most comprehensive research on an indigenised
variety of English' in Southeast Asia because `there is an impressive breadth in the research
on Philippine English.' The most important and widely quoted papers and articles in the
field include the works of Gonzalez (e.g., 1983, 1984, 1985, 1997), Gonzalez and Alberca
(1978), Alberca (1978), Marasigan (1980), Hermosa (1986), Garcia-Aranas (1990), and
Bautista (1982, 1996, 1997a, 2000a). In his review of `post-Llamzon studies' on Philippine
English, Gonzalez (1998) lists around 20 important works and essays in this regard.
Bautista (2000a) presents close to 50 works of such kind. Most of these studies have been
concerned mainly with the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of oral and (mostly)
written Philippine English. Likewise, they have focused on describing the English of
`educated' Filipinos. These studies, after all, have followed on from Llamzon's (1969)
Standard Filipino English which refers to `the type of English which educated Filipinos speak,
and which is acceptable in educated Filipino circles' (p. 15, italics as original). I argue that
one of the major inadequacies of Philippine English studies has been the stark silencing of
class-based, regionally-marked, and other potentially differentiating varieties of Philippine
English. `Philippine English' signifies the cultural and sociolinguistic signs of the entire
country, although scholars have generally reserved it only to the educated few.
More than three decades after Llamzon's work, Bautista's (2000a) landmark work has
finally settled the issue of a Standard Philippine English. Whereas the past three decades
have seen studies which have tinkered with the polemics of a standardized variety of
English in the Philippines, Bautista, in consolidating these studies into a comprehensive
review (2000b), coupled with her own study (2000a) based on a large corpus of data
produced by `educated' Filipinos (150 texts with each text having at least 2,000 words),
concludes that there is a Standard Philippine English, and the new task of scholars in the
field is to gear their work and concerns towards the preparation of a grammar of
Philippine English through a vigorous codification of its unique grammatical features in
the country. Bautista's noteworthy defence of Philippine English involves the claim that it
is a legitimate variety which does not fall short of the norms of Standard American English
(2000a: 20).
The value of linguistic diversity certainly resonates in this most recent thesis on
Philippine English. From phonological and syntactic to lexical, semantic, and idiomatic
studies, we get constant affirmation of the legitimacy of this Filipino variety of English as
shown, for example, in recent dictionaries (Bautista and Butler, 2000; Cruz and Bautista,
1995), and from respected Filipino writers like Gemino Abad (1997) and Nick Joaquin (in
Bautista, 2000a: 8; in Cruz, 1988: 127).
THE WORLD ENGLISHES PARADIGM

A clear proof of the theoretical dependence of Philippine English upon the world
Englishes paradigm was the milestone Manila conference in 1996, whose proceedings
appear in Bautista (1997b), during which state-of-the-art papers on the history of English
in the Philippines (Gonzalez, 1997), the phonology of Philippine English (Llamzon, 1997),
its lexicon (Bautista, 1997a), and its features in the classroom (Pena, 1997), were given. In
his keynote address entitled, `English as an Asian Language', Kachru (1997a) provided the
theoretical framework for all the work that has been done on Philippine English,
reiterating and affirming the many assumptions of Filipino scholars, on behalf of the
world Englishes paradigm.
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I argue that based on such a framework (also articulated, among others, in Kachru,
1983, 1985, 1986, 1997b), studies on world Englishes are usually based on the following
assumptions:
1. The phenomenal spread of English, carried mainly through globalization, has resulted in the
diffusion of the language.
2. Such diffusion has produced different Englishes through sociolinguistic processes usually
referred to as nativization, hybridization, localization, acculturation and/or indigenization.
3. Such processes are part of the whole project of decolonization among formerly colonized
countries where `owning' English may mean independence.
4. Post-colonial Englishes have been a legitimate medium through which various significations of
nationalism, resistance, and local histories and cultures have been voiced.
5. Legitimized and institutionalized Englishes are, linguistically and sociolinguistically, all equal.

A critical evaluation of these assumptions has already been made elsewhere (see Tupas,
2001a; on particular issues, see also Parakrama, 1995) so I do not intend to repeat them all
here, except to argue a few things. The globalization of English, for example, was
phenomenal, but we must always consider the fact that major social and cultural
dislocations occurred because of such spread (Fishman, 1988; for specific cases, see
Osborne, 1970; Kawamoto, 1993; Day, 1985). There is also the need to critically examine
the notion of globalization itself which underlies much work on world Englishes. Despite
its promises, the fruits of globalization have been unevenly distributed. We tend to forget
that the rhetoric of globalization, including terms like `interconnectivity', `global village',
and the `borderless world' (see Pakir, 1999), militates against what is happening in much of
the world today. Much of the free trade in the world is actually not free, and much of
economic competition among nations is actually a competition restricted to the richer
nations (Petras, 1999; Chomsky, 1998).
World Englishes have also been seen as the conduit of nationalism and ethnicity, thus
of resistance and change. In sociolinguistic terms, such political dimensions have been
referred to in the literature as `indigenization' (e.g., Gonzalez, 1998; Richards, 1983),
`nativization' (e.g., Dissanayake, 1985; Fishman, 1983; Kachru, 1987; Richards, 1983),
`acculturation' (e.g., Kachru, 1985), `localization' (e.g., Strevens, 1983), and `hybridization' (e.g., Kachru, 1997b). While it may again be true that English has been used to
appropriate colonial discourses in local historical and cultural matrices and practices, we
cannot adequately justify the continued use of English on the same terms without
looking at the structures of inequality within which the processes of nativization and
others occur.
Literature in the field is also teeming with the celebratory undertones of `decolonization', linked to the gradual taking back of the right of subjugated peoples to determine
their own lives and their future. However, most `ex-colonial' nations cannot be
considered largely independent even today. Most of Africa continues to be mired in
extreme poverty, while the rest of the Third World, to various degrees, continues to live
under the dictates of various neocolonial apparatuses such as policies, aids, and debt relief
packages from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade
Organization, as well as the US-led transnational corporations (Petras, 1999; Danaher,
1994b; Schmidt and Hersh, 2000; for regional examples, see Bienfeld, 2000; for recent
examples from the Philippines, see Ordonez, 1999; Rocamora, 1993; The International
NGO Forum, 1994).
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THE POLITICS OF PHILIPPINE ENGLISH

Dirlik (1994: 39) sums up what I hope to assert so far:

Postcolonial, in other words, is applicable not to all of postcolonial period but only to that period
after colonialism when, among other things, a forgetting of its effects has begun to set in. (italics
as original)

As soon as we locate studies on Philippine English within the world Englishes paradigm
that disconnects the past from the present, such studies flow perfectly well into a view of
the past as irrelevant to the present. This is the problem of memory in Philippine English.
In his keynote address to Filipino scholars of Philippine English, Kachru (1997a) laid
down the following propositions: `Why not consider the reincarnated English in the
Philippines, Singapore, and India to offer just three examples a part of our local
pluralistic heritage?' (p. 3); `Once a language establishes its autonomy, it is actually
liberated, and its ``liberated'' uses and functions have to be separated from its non-liberated
uses' (p. 19); and `The colonial dimension of the language is just one dimension. And the
constructs of identities with this medium across cultures is yet another dimension a
rewarding dimension' (p. 21). To which Filipino poet Gemino Abad `exuberantly and
memorably' (Bautista, 2000a: 8) responded: `English is now ours. We have colonized it too'
(Abad, 1997: 170). In essence, what all these eloquent articulations on the `new' role of
English in the Philippines and in `post-colonial' societies tell us is, first, to make a
dichotomy between `the colonial past' and `the post-colonial present' and second, forget
the centrality of colonialism as well as its effects long after it has been `gone'.
But, to borrow the words of Sassoon (2000: 73), in her proposal for more nuanced
analyses of globalization, `we need to avoid either implicitly romanticizing some ``before''
or failing to recognize that sentient human beings are making choices in conditions of
severe constraint but which also contain the possibility of new freedoms.' Such `possibility'
is inextricably a part of `the conditions of severe restraint'. Consider this: during the
publication of Llamzon's (1969) pioneering study, the Philippine government under
Marcos was gradually restructuring the Philippine educational system towards serving
an economy of foreign interests in the shape of corporations and industries (Tupas, 2001b).
Since then, the agenda of Philippine education has remained essentially the same: `that of
supplying the world market economy with a docile and cheap labor force who are trained
in English and the vocational and technical skills required by that economy' (Ordonez,
1999: 20).
What can we make of the fact that such a publication on `Standard Filipino English'
occurred at a time when the entire Philippine education system was gradually being
transformed into a factory of skills-generating human resources that would service
transnational corporations for the accumulation of capital for developed economies?
The following was the politico-economic context of Philippine English at the time:
In truth, the Philippines was not cut loose from the United States in 1946 to be left to its own
devices. An unending tangle of agreements and arrangements economic, military, political,
technical and administrative have kept U.S. control and influence in every sector of Philippine
society. In no other country in the world have U.S. corporations and army commanders, private
and government agencies, propagandists and policy-makers, had such a free hand as in the
Philippines. (Pomeroy, 1974: 2)
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A CONCEPTUAL PATHOLOGY OF `A NEOCOLONIAL PHILIPPINES'

Due to limited space, we cannot adequately push our arguments forward by mapping
out the twentieth-century unequal relations between the United States and the Philippines
in order to understand better the dynamics of present-day neocolonial conditions in the
Philippines. Nevertheless, we may still point to some significant conceptual dimensions of
neocolonialism in the country within which we can perhaps better place our understanding
of the politics of Philippine English. This will help us see the interrelatedness of a variety
of socioeconomic and political phenomena, both `past' and `present', and `domestic' and
`global'.
For example, Anderson's (1988) idea of `cacique democracy' explains how the past and
present Philippine social structure has been dominated by a small group of Filipino
`caciques' (or mestizo elites/oligarchs), whose roots go back to the fifteenth century under
Spanish rule, eventually gaining economic and political power towards the end of the
nineteenth century, then firming up and consolidating such power when many collaborated with the American colonizers. Elite democracy still characterizes post-World War II
Philippine society, indicating that the wide cleavage between the elites and the greater
number of Filipino masses remains the most significant concern in the country today. In
other words, many structures of inequality that perpetuate poverty and oppression in the
country are fundamentally linked with our past colonial experiences (see also Schirmer and
Shalom, 1987; Fast, 1973). As one political commentator recently wrote, the centuries-old
structures of unequal relation `between the upper crust of society and those below . . . still
are pretty much the same today. Only the names and faces have changed' (Hidalgo, 2002:
210).
Relatedly, another conceptual dimension to consider is the continuities between current
social relations in the Philippines and global relations engendered by the processes of
capitalism (e.g., Parrenas, 2001; San Juan, 1998). This will help negate the view that the
`internal' and `external' dynamics of Philippine society are clearly delineated. Contrary to
some claims that globalization has made nation-states obsolete as the flows of capital,
goods, and services have become more international in nature, globalization has in fact
been propelled largely by strong nation-states and other powerful `local' actors playing
their game in the global stage of capital accumulation and concentration (e.g., Schmidt and
Hersh, 2000; Chomsky, 1998; Danaher, 1994a; Stauffer, 1979). In a much-quoted article,
Petras (1999) explains how dominant states and their powerful economic enterprises are
also principal advocates of globalization. Current `domestic' socioeconomic configurations
of relations thus are also projected upon the global scene as practically all countries have
been integrated into the global network of capitalism. What may be described as
globalization thus is `essentially a continuation of the past based on the deepening and
extension of exploitative class relations into areas previously outside of capitalistic
production' (p. 6).
San Juan (1998: 22) captures such intermeshing of domestic and global structures of
relation which are themselves historically tied with past colonial experiences of the country
as explained above: `The major source of political and economic inequality in Filipino
society, all recent studies concur, is the control of land and other resources by an oligarchic
minority the chief middlemen and ``transmission'' belt of US neo-colonial rule who also
control much of the government, the legislature, the military and the courts, enabling
themselves to preserve their power.'
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POLITICO-LINGUISTICS WITHOUT POLITICS

Perhaps the most direct confrontation with the politics and ideology of Philippine
English was provided by Gonzalez (1976) in his rather unfashionable but commendable
essay, `Content in English language materials in the Philippines: a case study of cultural
and linguistic emancipation'. Interestingly, this article does not appear in recent important
surveys of studies on Philippine English (see Bautista, 2000b; Gonzalez, 1998), perhaps a
testament to how we eschew political issues in Philippine English even if we also justify its
existence largely on political grounds. I argue, however, that despite the essay's attempt to
engage with political concerns, it nevertheless fails to give us an adequate picture of the
role of Philippine English in Philippine society.
Working out his thesis `[b]eyond sociolinguistics and going into politico-linguistics and
economico-linguistics' (1976: 453), Gonzalez welcomes the idea that Filipinos have
finally appropriated English within their own cultural needs, thus emancipating themselves from the clutches of American English. Filipinos, Gonzalez continues, have `taken
the language for their own creative uses, an emancipation which is bound to result in
novelty in the creative uses of the patterning of English at the lexical and syntactic level,
in addition to semantic and phonological innovation' (p. 453). Thus, the choice of
English as an official language should not be viewed as a continuation of linguistic
imperialism, but as a form of linguistic emancipation parallel to the development of
economic and cultural emancipation in the Philippines. Such linguistic emancipation
gives Filipinos the right to change English. Filipinos are able to do this not because of
their loyalty to their former colonial masters, but simply out of convenience or for a
purely instrumental reason. In the context of classroom teaching, these ideas imply the
end of `American cultural content and the emergence of Philippine cultural content, for
what will be taught will be Philippine English as it is used in the domains where English
is used in the Philippines, largely for relatively culture-free content in science, mathematics,
and technology' (p. 452).
Let us examine these assertions in the light of Gonzalez' assumptions regarding his
`politico- and economico-linguistics'. First, Gonzalez believes in the possibility of appropriating English as a form of linguistic emancipation by `[s]etting aside a nationalistic focus
and observing the situation objectively from that of an amateur sociologist of language'
(p. 447). Brought to its logical conclusion, we may begin to ask whether such appropriation of English does not become a form of linguistic imperialism if viewed from a
`nationalist' perspective. Second, there is an implicit separation between linguistic emancipation on the one hand, and economic and cultural emancipation on the other hand, thus
limiting `emancipation' through language to simply the formal categories of English (e.g.,
lexis, syntax, semantics). Third, Gonzalez assumes that Philippine English is a legitimized
kind of English in the country that is taught in the schools. But it is one thing to say that
Filipinos are able to, and should, change the forms and meanings of English, and it is
another thing to say that such appropriation is socially and politically accepted. In the
words of Bautista (2000a: 17), `realistically speaking, for many Filipinos, there will still be
a ``standard of standards'', and that will be Standard American English.' In this issue of
standards specifically, Gonzalez constructs a `politico-linguistics' that does not account for
the politics of power and social stratification, which are both responsible for the
distribution of wealth (of which language is a part) in society, as well as the maintenance
of the status quo.
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REDEFINING THE NATURE OF PHILIPPINE ENGLISH

By taking up the cudgels for Philippine English, therefore, we have unwittingly shied
away from any discussion of Philippine English in its political and economic context. Like
many studies of world Englishes, we have dealt with Philippine English as a reified
sociolinguistic abstraction which does not have much to do with the lives of its speakers.
Though the justification for the legitimacy of Philippine English on `post-colonial grounds'
is commendable, it may lead to complacency about fundamental (political) issues of the
Filipino variety of English. We treat Philippine English as if it is spoken in a social vacuum
without conflictual interests of class and other origins. However we use English in the
country, structures of neocolonialism continue to condition much of the lives of the
Filipino people, most of whom use the language with varying degrees of proficiency
(Sibayan and Gonzalez, 1996), while others are shut out from the possibility of its use. We,
in the words of Goss (1996: 248), `have sought to go beyond colonialism and have failed to
address adequately which historical influences and conditions remain'. What then should
we do?
We have two major directions, of course: either we (1) continue to work within the
limited yet comfortable space of positivist linguistics where we describe and analyze the
various ways we use English in the country, and ignore the conditions of the people who
use (and do not use) the language in the first place; or, (2) set out to explore the possibilities
of locating our own work and the object of such work in the midst of the enduring
economic and historical unfreedom within which we negotiate our lives.
If we choose to explore new grounds for research on Philippine English, we may
therefore need to do two important tasks. First, we urgently need to expand the coverage
of Philippine English to include `uneducated' Englishes in the same manner Parakrama
(1995) has done with Sri Lankan English. This is one way to help democratize English
language studies in the Philippines because it will broaden the range of possibilities that
Filipinos can make an impact on the English language. According to Sibayan and
Gonzalez (1996: 163), there may be five major varieties of English in the country from
the English of (1) minimally functionally literate Filipinos, (2) Filipino overseas contract
workers, and (3) white-collar workers; to the English of (4) those who come from middle
and upper middle classes and (5) the intellectuals. While the first three groups constitute
the `vast majority' (1996: 163) of the population, however, we have chosen to study the
English of the latter groups, and call it Philippine English. Thus, by focusing simply on
`educated' English, studies on Philippine English have lent themselves towards an elitist
(socio)linguistics by almost completely ignoring the linguistic practices of genuinely
marginalized voices in Philippine society. Bautista (1982, 1996) perhaps has looked into
this matter through her work on the English of Filipino maids and bar girls, but such work
has actually not moved away from a correlational approach to language varieties; it has
ended up giving us a linguistic account of such `sub-varieties' of English in the Philippines
but failed to explain why the subjects spoke the way they did in the first place. The
democratic dimensions of Philippine English will make us realize that structures of use, no
matter how `ungrammatical' and `unsystematic', are imbedded in deepening structures of
economic inequality and power imbalances reared in our country's colorful history of
subjection and resistance.
Second, and as a corollary to the first, there is a need to redefine the nature of Philippine
English (at least the way we currently deploy the term) from being a postcolonial language
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to a neocolonial one. Philippine English is a neocolonial language not much different from
the Standard American English that we even concede as the `standard of standards' in the
Philippines. This shift from `post' to `neo' is not a whimsical choice, but a politically and
ideologically committed decision in the light of Filipinos' lived experiences with conditions, external and within, that have made an impact on their lives. Our insistence on a
neocolonial Philippine English lies in its signification as `a repetition with difference, a
regeneration of colonialism through other means' (Shohat, 1992: 107). This claim issues
from the observation that:
The `post-colonial' inadvertently glosses over the fact that global hegemony, even in the post-cold
war era, persists in forms other than overt colonial rule. As a signifier of a new historical epoch,
the term `post-colonial,' when compared with neo-colonialism, comes equipped with little
evocation of contemporary power relations. (Shohat, 1992: 105)

In other words, the so-called `postcoloniality' of Philippine English is derived from a

politico/academic agenda to justify the privileging of English in `ex-colonial' societies by
setting aside the continuing dominance of structures of inequality brought about by
neocolonial and global conditions of the current world order. Thus,
The complicity of postcolonial in hegemony lies in postcolonialism's diversion of attention from
contemporary problems of social, political, and cultural domination, and in its obfuscation of its
own relationship to what is but a condition of its emergence, that is, to a global capitalism that,
however fragmented in appearance, serves as the structuring principle of global relations (Dirlik,
1994: 331).

If indeed we expand the scope of Philippine English to include the politics of marginalized varieties, what may result is an ensuing recuperation of agency in these varieties
not an isolated, abstract, and oppositional `agency' that pits it against `subordination', but
a situated agency that recognizes its own formation. Here, we reinscribe a new form of
power in varieties of English across neocolonial contexts. It works within a framework
provided by Butler (1997): it is both `(a) resistance that is really a recuperation of power'
and `a recuperation that is really a resistance' (p. 13, italics as original).
While conceding that neocolonial power `acts on' its subjects (because power precedes its
subjects the speakers of such varieties of English, for example), it also `enacts' its subjects
`into being' (1997: 13, italics as original). Through world Englishes, neocolonial and global
conditions do not merely serve an external power that is `acting on' their speakers; it is also
`acted by' the speakers themselves (p. 15). Unlike `postcolonial' views of language,
however, I affirm the following proposition by Butler:
That agency is implicated in subordination is not the sign of a fatal self-contradiction at the core
of the subject and, hence, further proof of its pernicious or obsolete character. But neither does it
restore a pristine notion of the subject, derived from some classical liberal-humanist formulation,
whose agency is always and only opposed to power. The first view characterizes politically
sanctimonious forms of fatalism; the second, nave forms of political optimism. I hope to steer
clear of both these alternatives. (p. 17)

What we have here is that speakers of the Englishes of the world are able to rearticulate
the external power of global capitalism and neocolonialism that constitutes them (the
speakers) (indeed, no matter how fragmented in appearance), thereby exceeding this power
and `eclipsing' their `own emergence' (p. 14). In the words of Parrenas (2001: 35), however,
in her own appropriation of Butler's conception of agency, this rearticulation implies that
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`resistance [through innovations and appropriations of English in our case], as it

recuperates power, does not necessarily bring positive change.' Philippine English in this
sense is inextricably tied up with its own speakers (especially the majority of speakers
whose uses of the language have so far been largely ignored) who continue to wallow in
conditions largely not of their own making but, in the process, remake them in their (the
speakers') own image without necessarily changing the very structures of their own
subjection.
CONCLUSION

Specifically, what we have here is a view of Philippine English (and other Englishes as
well) which does not lose sight of the plight of its speakers in the light of their relations with
other agents of history and globalization, but nevertheless accords it with a refreshing
possibility of a resisting creativity by its speakers. Certainly, all is not well with the world
with such a situated agency, but embracing this notion of the nature of Philippine English
will hopefully encourage its scholars to embark on a concerted alliance with scholars of
other fields and with those who directly grapple with the realities of unfreedom in order to
consolidate their energies and resources towards genuine action for social reform and
change.
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