LANGUAGE specialists, educators, and philologists are among those vigilantly watching how the Supreme Court will rule on a petition for certiorari filed this week challenging the Constitutionality of Republic Act 12027.
Known as the Act of Discontinuing the Use of the Mother Tongue as Medium of Instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3, RA 12027 amends the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, which became effective on Oct. 12, 2024, without President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s signature after it lapsed into law a day earlier.
The Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 mandates that teaching assessment for Kindergarten up to Grade 3 students shall be taught in regional or native language and the curriculum must conform to the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education.
Under RA 12027, “[t]he medium of instruction shall revert to Filipino and until otherwise provided by law, English,” while the regional languages will serve as a supplementary media of instruction for the students.
It provides optional execution in monolingual classes, or a group of learners who speak the same mother tongue and are enrolled in the same grade level of a school year.
This week petitioners – parents, teachers, Indigenous Peoples, Bangsamoro, the Deaf, and other linguistic minorities – told the court the law infringes on their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and access to quality education in a language they fully understand.
There are 183 living languages, primarily from the Malayo-Polynesian language family, spoken in the Philippines, a nation of 117 million.
While Filipino and English are the official languages, language scholars say the country is exceedingly linguistically diverse, with a plethora of indigenous and regional languages.
Some languages are chewed over as “in a jam” or “dying” – largely because their speakers are perishing and there is no compendium of relevant written literature.
Petitioners are requesting the court for a judicial review to determine if the law conflicts with other Constitutional provisions, if so the reviewed law may be declared invalid and its implementation stopped.
Some scholars have argued the mother tongue plays a requisite role in shaping identity, facilitating communication, supporting education, and preserving cultural patrimony, making it indispensable for individual and collective security.
Using the learners’ mother tongue provides a strong foundation by developing cognitive skills and comprehension of the academic content from day one, they have noted.
The knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values gained through the mother tongue better support learning of other languages and learning through other languages later, they added.
There are of course problems encountered by teachers in implementing mother tongue-based instruction, which include absence of books written in mother tongue, lack of vocabulary, and lack of teacher-training.