The Forgotten Majority: When Filipinos Spoke Spanish
The common answer says Spanish never really took root in the Philippines. That claim does not survive a serious look at the historical record.
Spanish was widely spoken in the Philippines by the time the Americans arrived. Not by a tiny elite (or ilustrados). Not only inside churches or courts. By ordinary Filipinos, as a first or second language. What changed was not public preference, but policy, power, and war.
The decline of Spanish was not natural. It was engineered.
First, we need to correct the numbers.
American censuses in 1903 and 1905 claimed that only around 10 percent of Filipinos spoke Spanish. With a population of roughly nine million, this placed Spanish speakers at about 900,000. But this figure counted only those who spoke Spanish as their first and only language.
In 1908, Luciano de la Rosa, a Katipunan veteran, lawyer, and member of the Philippine Assembly, published a different finding. He showed that around 60 percent of Filipinos spoke Spanish as a second language. Combined with first language speakers, this means close to 70 percent of the population could speak Spanish in some form.
That is a majority.
This was not an abstract claim. Early American officials confirmed it themselves. David P. Barrows, Director of the Bureau of Public Instruction, noted that the socially influential classes spoke Spanish. Politics, journalism, and commerce operated mainly in Spanish. English, at that point, was marginal.
Spanish was the working language of public life.
So what changed?
American rule deliberately disconnected the Philippines from the Hispanic world. This happened through three main channels.
First, education.
The Americans introduced a public school system that was broader and more efficient than what existed before. This part is often praised, and rightly so. But the system was designed to privilege English. Spanish was excluded from higher education and public administration. Over time, English became the language of mobility.
Ironically, early American education even increased Spanish literacy at first. Barrows himself admitted that more Filipinos knew Spanish after the American occupation began. This alarmed colonial officials. Barrows openly argued that Spanish would decline if it were cut off from institutional support, since the Philippines was geographically isolated from other Spanish-speaking countries.
That was not an accident. It was strategy.
Second, suppression and stigma.
Spanish was slowly removed from public life. It was portrayed as backward. Spain was framed as the villain of history, while the United States cast itself as the savior. English was presented as modern, practical, and necessary. Spanish became associated with the past, even with punishment. Speaking it meant exclusion from power.
Prominent Filipino educators resisted this shift. They were ignored.
Third, destruction.
World War II delivered the final blow.
Manila was the center of Spanish-speaking life. Districts like Intramuros and Ermita formed the cultural core of Philippine Hispanidad. During the Battle of Manila, over 100,000 civilians died. Most of the city was destroyed. Around 90 percent of Spanish-owned buildings and institutions were wiped out.
Spanish-speaking communities were physically erased.
Even then, Spanish did not disappear overnight. Before the war, Spanish literature in the Philippines experienced a golden age. Major Filipino writers were still producing works in Spanish well into the 1920s and 1930s. English literature was still developing.
Manila itself remained largely Spanish-speaking until the war. Ermita even developed its own Chavacano variety, now extinct.
After three American wars fought on Philippine soil, English became the language of the victor.
This history matters.
The disappearance of Spanish in the Philippines was not proof that Filipinos rejected it. It was the result of deliberate policy, cultural isolation, and mass destruction. Guillermo Gómez Rivera calls this cultural genocide. That term is debated. But the intent to sever the Philippines from its Hispanic roots is clearly documented.
The United States achieved many things. But its empire was built by dismantling other cultures. The Philippines is not unique. Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Native American nations tell similar stories.
Spanish in the Philippines is weakened, but not dead. What is missing is an honest conversation. One that acknowledges how language power works. One that accepts that history is not neutral.
You cannot explain the present if you erase the past.
References
- Gómez Rivera, G. La persecución del uso oficial del idioma español en Filipinas. Revista Arbil.
- Gómez Rivera, G. Statistics: The Spanish Language in the Philippines.
- Barrows, D. P. Reports of the Bureau of Public Instruction.
- Quilis, A. and Casado-Fresnillo, C. La lengua española en Filipinas. Madrid, 2008.
- Rodríguez-Ponga, R. Pero ¿cuántos hablan español en Filipinas? Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos.
- The Sack of Manila. The Battling Bastards of Bataan.
