{"content":[{"text":"As part of my personal advocacy as concurrent chairman of \n the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, I have initiated its \n redirection and refocusing towards intangible cultural heritage, beyond \n reinforcing the NCCA’s existing programs as the functioning council for the \n arts of the country. As defined by UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage \n covers, among other things, language and literature, and literature includes \n indigenous oral and unwritten tradition. The Philippines has, as a matter \n of fact, more than 50 folk epics that await documentation, transcription, as \n well as serious study by our literary scholars and anthropologists. \n Now, come to think of it, all languages are indigenous, including \n English. If we take indigenous to mean simply “native.” But not all languages \n are created equal, despite Geoffrey Chaucer. Renowned as the greatest poet \n of all time, Chaucer is said to have had no regard for the superiority of any \n language. That is how he got into the frontline, so to speak, of “developing” \n the English language. His Canterbury Tales, as we know it now—and a little \n bit later, Shakespeare and his verse drama and sonnets—extricated early \n English from being the tongue of the poor and lowly, to becoming a formal \n and written language of poetry, narrative and theater. Thus, English came to \n be spoken and read by the British royalty and elite, who use to scoff at it and \n only knew Latin or French. \n Surely it would be hard to imagine what language we’d be using now \n in this conference if there were neither Troilus and Cressida nor the 24 stories \n of the Canterbury Tales. \n Which again leads me back to a nagging question under our theme. \n What threatens indigenous languages, and as a corollary, what limits their \n literary freedom? My immediate response would be as mundane as the lack \n of opportunity to be read as well as to get published. \n That languages may have been created equal may be true in an Edenic \n setting. But we all know that the contemporary world is a practical Tower of \n Babel where languages compete for dominance or superiority, or even basic \n recognition and respectability. Indigenous languages and their presumed \n literary freedom are restricted, not only by a foreign language-dominated \n literary industry but by the mere fact that they are “born” with an already \n dwindling number of speakers. \n The “language shirt” we referred to earlier means that the indigenous \n speakers are compelled to learn and speak the most immediate dominant \n language in order to survive in the geographic setting of that language. That is,","bbox":{"left":0.124995,"top":0.07369,"width":0.730254,"height":0.832502}},{"text":"2","bbox":{"left":0.054722,"top":0.941187,"width":0.010208000000000002,"height":0.016236000000000028}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}