Keeping in Mind My Mother Tongue

               Mother language has a great effect in our growth even before we are being born and it also plays an important role in shaping our thoughts and emotions. Our personality development depends upon what has been conveyed through the mother tongue so, vocabulary must be chosen with care when talking to one another. Our learning of concepts and skills starts with our mother tongue and through this; we may express our feelings and emotions. Mother language has such an important role in us because our childhood is spent in its imprints. A bond between us and our parents is established by love, compassion, body language, and the most important one, verbal language. Connections between heart, brain, and tongue are being made when a person speaks their mother tongue. Our characteristics are truly revealed through the mother tongue because the sound of the mother tongue in the ear and its meaning in the heart give us trust and confidence.

                Mother tongue is also an indicator of our cultural identity. An Ilocano like us talks and connects with one another with our mother tongue which is Iloco. Iloco dialect links us with the culture of our society and shapes our identity as Ilocanos. Children from immigrant families who don’t know their native language are experiencing identity crisis because when a child doesn’t know his language well, we can’t say that he will be nurtured with his culture properly for the face that the relationship between language and culture is deeply rooted. Mother tongue is a powerful tool used to preserve culture and cultural ties and children who are unaware of their culture, language, and history will lose confidence in them together with the family, society, and the nation to where they belong to. We will identify ourselves with the language and culture we know best. We must not forget that we live in a multicultural society and we should learn about other cultures and respect them as well.

                To talk in a language is developed though our mother tongue. We will get familiarized with the shade of a language, how to learn and use it, and it will enable us to learn other languages as well. If we are very good in our first language then, it would be much easier for us to learn other languages learned at school. And if we continue to develop these abilities in two or more languages throughout our primary school years, we gain a deeper understanding of language and will acquire knowledge about how it can be manipulated and applied in different ways. Our mother tongue is being replaced by the majority used language if we have little mother tongue support at home. Some parents and educators believe that in order for us to learn a second language quickly and succeed at school, we should use the majority language not only at school, but even at home. We know that we Filipinos can speak fluently two or three languages. And as Ilocanos, we should continue using our mother language in able not to lose it when getting used to other languages. But some just express themselves in the majority language when they lack literacy and vocabulary in their mother tongue.