Acceso usuarios
Andrew Gonzalez
The development of the national language of the Philippines is sketched from the initial selection of Tagalog to its standardisation and propagation as Wikang Pambansa (national language), and its renaming as Pilipino, subsequently FILIPINO.
The last phase of language development is the phase of cultivation which has many aspects. Usually the national language is cultivated as a language of imaginative literature, the mass media, a medium of instruction in the basic educational system, as the language of governance, and as a language of academic discourse.
The last phase can be considered as a process of modernisation (through its use to thematise current realities and as a process of intellectualisation (as a medium of oral and written academic discourse)).
The intellectualisation phase consists not only of lexical expansion (through modern terminologiesfor thedisciplines) but likewiseof stylistic differentiation (using syntactic devices for different types of prose discourse). Intellectualisation is examined as process and product and according to its inner (psychological) and outer (sociological) dimensions.
Some theoretical insights from the Philippine experience are discussed ; the intellectualisation of Filipino is unprecedented because it is an ongoing process that can be documented in detail through the corpus being generated and should enrich the scholarly literature on this topic.
