Bahay Kubo and the Filipino language

My son loves to sing bahay kubo even though I don’t sing it to him very often like I did when he was still in my womb. This makes me very proud and he evens start to count in Pilipino with a little help yet he’s only 2 years old.  And I think it also makes him proud to be able to sing songs other than danish children songs.

Now the doctors and the health care nurses if I can call them that encourages parents with other danish backgrounds to teach and start to talk to the babies as early their mother tongue because this is seen as an advantages for children to learn to speak another languages. It makes them glad and proud of it.

I started to talk to him in Pilipino because I don’t want to deprived him of understanding my culture and the most important thing is he is able to communicate with my family especially to my parents. Most of the second generation children here that I know including my cousins doesn’t speak the language and now that they are young adult they blame their mothers why they we’re not taught of this language.

One time I was speaking to some children with Filipino parents if they know how to count or say something in Filipino and they are 5-7 years and a 13 year old. Nope not a thing while they we’re amazed my was singing and counting. I fell pity for them for not learning how wonderful language we have.

As I was in once was an audience of a Filipino lecture about understanding Filipinos in a workplace by Prof. Felipe De Leon Jr., commissioner of Culture and Arts. He explains that our languages has more adverbs and adjectives than any other languages where we can describe a lot of which I also find it difficult to directly translate to other languages, like danish and English in my case.

So maybe this is not a bad advise to all filipinamoms living outside the Philippines, give your children a chance to learn our language if you don’t like Filipino because is tagalog then your own dialect.  You can start with bahay kubo because it is a nice song and somehow you remember all the names of vegetables and then you will think of cooking pinakbet later.