Perspectives on Philippine Languages: Five Centuries of European Scholarship by Marlies S. Salazar (review)

Marlies Salazar’s Perspectives on Philippine Languages condenses the history of European scholarship on culture and language by gathering archival documents from the sixteenth up to the second half of the twentieth century from scholars aside from those of Spanish and English descent. Its range covers a wide variety of works, from dictionaries to prayer books and botanical taxonomies, in a variety of translations that includes almost all major continental European languages. The documents that Salazar consulted—including those in advanced stages of deterioration, such as books with missing pages, pages worn out, letters that are about to fade, books on the verge of disappearing in dust—reveal the broad temporal scope of her work and the strong archival research that served as its basis. With her rigorous study of linguistics and history, Salazar illuminates the Philippines—at the height of Eurocentrism—as a significant object of study. Yet at the heart of her optimism is a chronology that reinstates the Philippines as a mere recipient of European enlightenment, and the Philippine languages as short shrifts in Western scholarship.

Embracing such breadth of history is always difficult. Salazar organizes her historical timeline by rendering each century from the fifteenth until the twentieth century as chapters of the book, marking key events in the fields of linguistics and Philippine history under each historical period. However, this ambitious scope also forces her to simplify historical content. For example, she only provides summaries of the contributions to language scholarship of key scholars or reduces a historical period into a list of sorts.

Salazar also tends to get caught in a deluge of archival facts to the detriment of historical analysis. For instance, right from the opening chapter, “Age of Discovery,” Salazar describes the early phase in the Westerners’ contact with Philippine societies as the moment they finally “get [to have a] feel for the languages and culture of the Philippines” (1). Their “feel” for the languages transpired through the lives and works of missionaries sent to the Philippine islands. The goal of these missionaries was to introduce Catholicism to the natives as part of their expansion in the Far East, necessitating a strong language education among the community dwellers as well as for themselves. These missionaries barely taught Spanish to the locals, while they also learned the local languages, which became part of the early European linguistic scholarship on the Philippines. However, as Salazar fleshes out the details of this burgeoning scholarship by contextualizing it against the backdrop of the advent of Spanish colonialism, the historical narrative is eclipsed as the discussion leaps into the Age of Enlightenment—from the Spanish-colonial Philippines to the rise of the European “encyclopedists” (14–16). The chronological gap prevents Salazar from giving a full assessment of the Spanish-colonial interest in Philippine languages because of the lack of historical continuity that links the islands to the eighteenth-century drive of the imperial centers to amass encyclopedic knowledge from different countries. Salazar’s very methodology reveals analytical challenges and needs to be problematized because the disciplinal concerns of linguistics are themselves historically complicit in the colonial project.

Weaving the intersections between the history of linguistics and colonialism in the Philippines, Salazar struggles at the verity of such an ambitious undertaking by simply limiting everything as a “contextualization” of the schools of thought instead of engaging and launching a critique of each one of them (1). In the second chapter, “The Rise of Historical Comparative Linguistics,” at the tail end of the eighteenth century, she illustrates the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s scholarship by probing into his work On the Kawi Language on the Island of Java. This work articulates how Philippine languages like Tagalog are outside the range of Indian influence in Southeast Asia and how Tagalog exhibits similarities to Malayo-Polynesian languages. In Humboldt’s assessment, Tagalog is also the language that has a “richest grammatical development” (49). Thus...