When only English counts, who gets left out?

Originally published in Manila Bulletin

August is National Language Month — a time meant to honor the diverse linguistic heritage of our nation. And yet, there is something peculiar, even contradictory, about this commemoration: the very institutions that call on us to celebrate language are often the same ones that enforce English as the standard of intelligence, education, and legitimacy. From classrooms to courtrooms, boardrooms to online platforms, one language reigns — not because it’s better, but because it’s powerful.

If Ludwig Wittgenstein were alive today, he would find this situation worth interrogating — not as a technical issue, but as a deep social contradiction. For Wittgenstein, language was not simply a tool for conveying information. It was a form of life: a living practice shaped by community, culture, and daily use. His work, especially in his later years, reminds us that meaning is not fixed by dictionaries or rules, but by how words are actually used in context. Language is not static; it is alive in the mouths and hands of those who speak it.

And yet, when only some languages are treated as valid forms of expression — particularly in formal, economic, or academic life — we do not merely silence words. We silence lives.

Wittgenstein famously wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” In a country where over 170 local languages are spoken, the dominance of English draws clear and often unforgiving boundaries around whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is valued, and whose lives are recognized. When students are penalized for speaking their mother tongue in school, when dialects are dismissed as “vernacular” and excluded from science, law, or governance, and when job interviews privilege accent over substance, language becomes a gatekeeper — not of communication, but of opportunity. These aren't neutral choices; they are acts of exclusion dressed in the guise of professionalism or progress.

From Wittgenstein’s perspective, this is not about grammar but about exclusion. A language that is not recognized in public life becomes, in effect, a language that cannot speak. Its speakers become invisible participants in their own society, unable to fully join the “language games” of influence and authority. This is not accidental — it is political.

In Wittgenstein’s terms, every language is a game with rules. But when only one game is allowed on the field, and the rest are dismissed as child’s play, then what we’re seeing is not a natural hierarchy of usefulness or clarity. We are seeing the enforcement of one form of life over another. And when that happens, our institutions aren’t just communicating — they are colonizing.

The result is the slow, bureaucratic death of linguistic diversity. According to UNESCO, the majority of Philippine languages are endangered. Not because people have stopped speaking them at home, but because the state and society have stopped listening to them in public. This process does not announce itself. It occurs through curricula, hiring policies, standardized tests, and cultural assumptions. And so we arrive at the contradiction of National Language Month: celebrating the languages we are simultaneously allowing to disappear.

Wittgenstein would urge us to notice what is right in front of us. To stop asking, “Is this language useful?” and begin asking, “Whose life is allowed to speak?” Language, he reminds us, is not a mirror of the world — it is the ground we stand on. When that ground narrows to a single dialect of power, we risk not only linguistic extinction but the loss of entire ways of being human.

So this August, perhaps the real act of commemoration is not mere celebration but reclamation. To honor our languages not as relics, but as living, valid, and powerful expressions of thought. To listen more carefully — not just to English, but to the many other forms of life that speak around us every day.

Because whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must not let vanish.

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