Tagalog or taglish : preferred medium of communication among Filipino non-fluent bilinguals in Philippine cities

• Main Author: Go, Mikhail Alic C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Subjects: Filipino factory labor workers; Filipino lower class; codeswitching; code alternation; lexical borrowing; accommodation/convergence; divergence/over-under accommodation; communication
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4334; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_masteral/article/11172/viewcontent/CDTG005291_P.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

The present study aims to investigate the preferred mode of discourse among Filipino factory labor workers. A total of seventy labor workers were observed for nine months dating from November 2011 to July 2012. Additionally, twenty-eight of them were informally interviewed. An audio-recorder was further used after the aforementioned duration of the study so as to make the findings more consistent, valid, and reliable. The results found that they favor the use of Tagalog as their primary medium of communication when conversing among themselves, their peers, and their respective families. The results would also reveal that their main reason for using their mother tongue when communicating with others is that they would like to be socially accepted within their social group. The findings would further indicate that the frequent use of Taglish of other people, especially those whose social standing is considerably higher than them would somehow construct a social barrier among them. It could be said, then, that there is still a need to address this particular gap in literature as there has been no study until now which concluded that there are still many Filipinos living in Philippine cities that prefer to use Tagalog as their primary mode of discourse rather than Taglish.