I came across a post recently about an observation that, as a Bicolano, felt completely ordinary to me: Bicolanos speaking Tagalog to each other.

Which, yes, we do that.

Then someone in the comments suggested that this kind of thing could eventually threaten the survival of the language.

And that was the part that made me go, hmm.

Because my first reaction was, I don’t think that’s how that works.

I grew up speaking Bikol. Tagalog has always been there too. So has English. At this point, switching between all three is so normal that most of the time I don’t think about it as switching at all.

At home, the default is Bikol. It is the language of ordinary life. Family conversations, teasing, complaints, gossip, getting someone’s attention from another room. Then someone makes a joke in Tagalog. Someone reacts to something on television in English. The conversation goes back to Bikol. Nobody actually stops to acknowledge that anything happened.

My father once noticed that we talk to our dogs in English. So when he needs to command them to go inside, he would comically be going, “go inside!” and it will work because apparently the dogs have a language policy.

Even right now, I am thinking through this essay in English because it is the language I tend to default to when I write or try to organize an idea. That does not mean I go home and speak English to my family. I have a friend I converse to almost exclusively in English and just never questioned why. We know we get looks out in the wild when we’re doing that but we’ve pretty much stopped caring. My point being: different languages just seem to come forward for different things.

And so the idea that Bicolanos speaking Tagalog to one another to be able to understand each other was, by itself, evidence that there’s a threat to its existence did not immediately compute.

First, which Bikol are we talking about?

Before getting into whether Bikol is actually in danger of disappearing, there is already a problem with talking about “Bikol” as though everyone in the region speaks one uniform thing. We don’t.

Also, I want to be annoyingly precise about something. I am Bicolano. The geographic region is Bicol. The language is Bikol. If I am already dragging myself into a linguistics nerdout, I might as well commit.

And Bikol the language also needs an asterisk here.

The linguistic map of the region changes depending on which classification you use. Older descriptions divide Bikol languages into coastal and inland groupings. Newer institutional descriptions do not always draw the lines in exactly the same places.¹ What matters here is that Bikol is linguistically plural. There are related languages and varieties across Albay, Camarines Sur, Camarines Norte, Catanduanes, Sorsogon, and nearby areas, and they are not all mutually effortless.

I was born in Tiwi, on the eastern coast of Albay, bordered on the north by the Partido district of Camarines Sur. The Bikol I grew up with sits in the part of the region where the more widely understood Bikol varieties are spoken. KWF’s current language repository includes Tiwi in its Bikol-speaking area and identifies Bikol Legazpi as the most widespread variety in Albay. It also describes Bikol as the language used by the Catholic Church across the region.²

That last part feels obvious if you grew up there. Bikol is in the liturgy. It is in Mass. It is in prayers and rituals and local radio and TV. There is a version of the language that travels farther than your town does.

Then I went to college in Legazpi, where people from different parts of the region converged.

This was where the plurality became less theoretical.

You could be sitting with people who were all Bicolano and still not have exactly the same Bikol. Someone from Catanduanes could sound very different from someone from Albay. Someone from Rinconada had another language system altogether. Go farther south into Sorsogon and you start encountering varieties shaped by proximity to the Visayas, including speech people commonly fold under the label Bisakol. Move only a few towns inland in Albay and you get Miraya.

I eventually picked up some Miraya myself after spending years in Legazpi and later working in Daraga, where KWF identifies Miraya as the local variety.³ You hear the change in vocabulary, accent, rhythm, sometimes even in how a familiar thought is put together.

And somehow, among all these people from the same region, Tagalog often became the easiest language in the middle.

The lingua franca, almost.

It was funny when you stopped to think about it. Here we were, all Bicolanos, sometimes using the national language because figuring out how much of each other’s Bikol we could understand was more work than simply speaking Tagalog.

But mostly we did not stop to think about it.

Tagalog was just there.

A Bicol University study on Central Bikol describes it as a language of “wider communication,” used in work and mass media to bridge language differences across the region.⁴ That helps explain why some forms of Bikol travel more easily than others. But Tagalog has another advantage. Most of us already know it extremely well.

That has always been something I took for granted until I met people from other parts of the Philippines who seemed surprised by how easily Bicolanos spoke Tagalog.

To me, it was never a remarkable skill.

It was just another language we had.

We don’t decide to switch. We just do.

I had assumed code-switching meant there was some conscious switch involved. Like your brain goes, okay, Tagalog now.

Apparently, no.

In linguistics, code-switching can refer to the spontaneous use of two or more languages in the course of a conversation. It can happen between sentences, inside a sentence, or around a particular word without the speaker deliberately planning the switch.⁵ Research on natural bilingual speech also finds that switching is not random linguistic chaos. Proficient multilingual speakers do it in patterned, systematic ways.⁶

Which sounds much closer to what happens at home.

Sometimes I only notice we have switched languages after the fact. We can be talking in Bikol, then someone makes a joke in Tagalog, then someone reacts in English, and somehow none of it feels like a change in language.

It just feels like talking.

The language that comes out can depend on what you are saying, who you are talking to, what you are quoting, what you are reacting to, or apparently whether you are telling a dog to go inside.

That matters to the original question because if you observed my family for half an hour and simply counted every time Tagalog or English appeared, you could convince yourself that Bikol was constantly being displaced.

But that would miss what the languages are actually doing.

Bikol remains the language underneath most of the day. I can leave it and come back without thinking. So perhaps the question is not whether another language appears. Maybe it is whether Bikol is still there to come back to.

The language nobody taught me

This is the part that dawned on me a certain way. Nobody really taught me Bikol. Not formally, anyway.

English was taught. Filipino was taught. They were subjects. They had textbooks, lessons, grammar exercises, exams. They followed us through school and, if you can believe it, well into college.

Bikol was simply there.

I grew up inside it.

It was spoken by adults around me. Parents. Relatives. Neighbors. People talking while cooking, arguing, joking, complaining, doing whatever adults did while children were supposedly not listening.

And because of that, there are things I know in Bikol that I could not tell you when or how I learned.

Certain words.

Certain turns of phrase.

Certain ways of being annoyed.

This is one of my favorite things about the language, actually. There are words and expressions that seem to occupy very specific positions on the irritation scale. Mildly bothered is not the same thing as exasperated. Exasperated is not the same thing as properly pissed off. Sometimes the word itself practically arrives with the facial expression required to say it.

Nobody sat me down and taught me those distinctions.

You heard the word.

You heard the tone.

You knew who had done what.

Eventually, you knew what it meant.

That is what “mother tongue” meant to me growing up. Not a subject. Not a language I studied, just the language life was already happening in.

There was later a national Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education policy that used local languages as media of instruction in the early grades. But that came after my own elementary-school years, and it was not the same thing as having Bikol taught continuously as a dedicated language subject in the way Filipino and English were. The national policy itself has since changed. Republic Act No. 12027, which lapsed into law in October 2024, discontinued mandatory use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3, while allowing optional implementation in qualifying monolingual classes. DepEd issued the implementing rules in August 2025.⁷

For my generation, though, Bikol was mostly something you arrived at school already knowing.

And once I put it that way, I realized how much work the environment had been doing.

If nobody formally taught us the language, then the adults around us did.

Constantly.

Without calling it teaching.

”How do you not know that?”

I have a younger sister who is Gen Z, and every so often she will hear a Bikol word and ask us what it means.

Our first response is usually disbelief.

How do you not know that?

We answer her, obviously. But first we act as though she has failed some test she was never told she was taking.

And the more I think about that, the less fair it seems.

Why would she know it?

Nobody taught it to her.

Nobody taught it to me either.

I just heard it enough.

I spent enough time around adults who used those words naturally. I absorbed the meaning from tone and context and repetition. If I really did not understand, I asked. Eventually enough pieces accumulated that I stopped needing to.

My sister speaks Bikol. She understands Bikol. This is not a story about someone who suddenly grew up unable to speak the language of her family.

But there are gaps.

Words I assume everyone knows that she does not.

Expressions that land immediately for me but need explaining to her.

Maybe that is simply what generations do. Vocabulary changes. Slang changes. Some words become old-fashioned. I do not want to turn every moment of “kids these days” into evidence of linguistic collapse.

But it did make me wonder if a language can start thinning before anyone would describe it as endangered.

Not disappearing.

Thinning.

The common vocabulary stays. The grammar stays. Everybody can still talk to one another. But some of the more specific words become generational. Some distinctions get harder to make without reaching for Tagalog or English. Some expressions become things younger people recognize from older relatives rather than things they would instinctively use themselves.

The language is still alive.

Just maybe not at quite the same resolution.

So what actually endangers a language?

This was the point where I looked up how language endangerment is actually assessed.

UNESCO’s framework is useful here because it explicitly says you cannot judge a language’s vitality from one factor alone.⁸

It looks at things like the number and proportion of speakers, where the language is used, whether it is entering new domains and media, whether educational and literacy materials exist, how institutions treat it, how the community itself feels about it, and, importantly, whether the language is being passed from one generation to the next.⁸

That last one is the part that keeps coming up.

Are children learning it?

Not just understanding it. Learning it as something they can actually use.

UNESCO even makes a distinction that sounds remarkably like the thing I was trying to articulate. A language can reach a stage where parents still speak it to their children, but the children do not typically answer in it.⁸

That is a very different warning sign from two fluent adults occasionally choosing Tagalog because it is easier.

Multilingualism by itself is not necessarily the threat. UNESCO says that explicitly too.⁸

The more important question is what happens to the domains where Bikol is expected to live.

At home?

At school?

At work?

At church?

Online?

In jokes?

In arguments?

In writing?

In whatever extremely specific thing somebody is ranting about in the family group chat?

A language can lose ground not because everybody suddenly stops speaking it, but because there are fewer and fewer situations where it is the language that naturally comes out.

And this is where my initial confidence that “Bikol is fine” needs some qualification.

KWF’s current ethnographic profile classifies Bikol as safe overall. It says younger generations across the region still actively use it and acquire it at home.²

But the same profile also says the situation is not uniform. In parts of Albay, some families are raising children in Filipino and English. In Catanduanes, informants pointed to technology and the preference of some affluent families for English as pressures on younger speakers.²

So both things can be true.

Bikol can be broadly healthy.

And something can still be shifting underneath that broad category.

Especially because “Bikol” itself contains multiple language communities whose vitality does not have to move in the same direction. KWF, for example, separately lists Rinkonada as safe, while some Inagta languages in the same region are already classified as endangered.⁹

Suddenly, asking “Is Bikol endangered?” feels almost too blunt to be useful.

Which Bikol?

Where?

Among whom?

And what are their children speaking?

The generation I can’t speak for

I can tell you what my childhood sounded like. I can tell you what my parents’ generation sounded like. I can tell you that my sister occasionally asks me what a word means and I have the extremely older-sibling reaction of wondering how she somehow missed a piece of information nobody actually taught either of us.

What I cannot tell you, based only on my own life, is what childhood in Bicol sounds like now.

The media environment alone is different.

When I was growing up, Tagalog came through television and radio and school. English came through school too. Bikol came through the actual people around me.

A child now can spend hours inside a media environment that is barely local at all.

English-language YouTube. Tagalog TikTok. K-pop. Anime. American streamers. Filipino influencers. Group chats where three languages can appear in four sentences.

None of that automatically kills a local language.

I am literally an example of someone who uses all three every day.

But if your mother tongue depends heavily on being absorbed from the people and environment around you, then changes to that environment have to matter somehow.

Maybe the useful question is not simply what language a child knows.

It is what language feels available without effort.

What language do they joke in?

What language do they fight with their siblings in?

What language comes out when they are annoyed?

What language do they type without thinking?

And when an older relative uses a word they have never heard before, can they work out what it means?

Or do they have to ask?

Maybe the danger is not the switching

I started with a comment under a post that suggested Bicolanos speaking Tagalog to one another could threaten the survival of Bikol.

I still don’t think the switch itself proves very much.

Sometimes Tagalog is just the easiest shared language between Bicolanos who do not speak the same Bikol variety.

Sometimes it is a joke.

Sometimes it is a quote.

Sometimes that is simply the language your brain happened to reach for.

Sometimes the dogs only respond to English.

That is multilingualism. It is normal enough that the people doing it may not even notice.

The thing I would pay more attention to now is whether everyone still has the same ability to switch back.

Not literally to the exact same vocabulary. Language does not stay frozen across generations and probably should not.

But back into a Bikol that is broad enough to contain ordinary life.

Back into the jokes.

Back into anger.

Back into those absurdly specific degrees of annoyance.

Back into the words nobody teaches you because everybody assumes you will hear them somewhere.

Because that assumption is doing a lot of work.

And I happen to be writing this in August, which feels like an appropriate afterthought.

August is officially Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa, established as a month-long national observance in 1997.¹⁰ The national framing is still singular, but the celebration has also made room over the years for the plurality underneath it. DepEd’s 2007 theme was Maraming Wika, Matatag na Bansa, explicitly recognizing all Philippine languages as cultural and social resources.¹¹ Some universities have even used the framing Buwan ng mga Wika. Languages, plural.¹²

I remember encountering that plural framing in university, and I liked it then.

I think I understand better now why.

There is a difference between asking what language lets a country speak to itself and asking what languages the people in that country are trying not to lose.

Tagalog can be the language two Bicolanos use to meet in the middle without either of them giving anything up.

The harder question is what is waiting for them when they go home. What language do they speak there? What words do their younger siblings still know?

What will their children know without being taught?

And which words will disappear before anyone realizes they were supposed to be passed on?

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Rabbit hole record

Footnotes

1. Curtis D. McFarland’s The Dialects of the Bikol Area (1974) is one of the older classification references associated with Coastal and Inland Bikol. Glottolog catalogs the work and its classifications. KWF’s current repository uses a somewhat different presentation of Bikol and its varieties, which is why I am treating the taxonomy here as a model rather than a single settled map. Glottolog reference; KWF Bikol repository. ↩

2. Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, “Bikol,” KWF Repositoryo, based on its Lingguwistikong Etnograpiya ng Bikol. The profile lists Tiwi among Bikol-speaking areas, identifies Bikol Legazpi as widespread in Albay, describes Bikol’s use in the Catholic Church, and discusses language vitality across provinces. KWF Repositoryo. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. KWF identifies Bikol Miraya in Daraga, Camalig, Guinobatan, Jovellar, Ligao, Libon, Oas, Pio Duran, Polangui, and parts of Sorsogon. KWF Repositoryo: Bikol. For a more focused linguistic study of East Miraya, see the Bicol University R&D Journal’s “Phonological, Lexical, and Morphological Analysis of the Philippine East Miraya Bikol-Pilar Dialect.” Bicol University R&D Journal. ↩

4. Ryan G. de la Torre and colleagues, “Community-Based Language Development of Central Bikol,” BU R&D Journal 26(1). The study places Central Bikol at EGIDS Level 3, “Wider Communication,” describing its use in work and mass media to bridge language differences across a region. Bicol University R&D Journal. ↩

5. Gülay Cedden et al., “The ‘code-switching issue’: transition from (socio)linguistic to cognitive research,” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (2024). The review describes code-switching as the spontaneous use of two or more languages during conversation. Cambridge Core. ↩

6. Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, “On the emergence of bilingual code-switching competence,” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4(3), 2001. The article reviews evidence that proficient bilingual code-switching is systematic and rule-governed rather than random mixing. Cambridge Core. See also Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine E. Travis on spontaneous code-switching in natural bilingual speech. Cambridge Core. ↩

7. Republic Act No. 12027 discontinued mandatory mother-tongue medium of instruction from Kindergarten through Grade 3 and permits optional implementation in qualifying monolingual classes. DepEd published the law’s implementing rules on August 1, 2025. DepEd Memorandum No. 059, s. 2025. DepEd’s 2024 notice states that RA 12027 lapsed into law on October 10, 2024. DepEd notice. ↩

8. UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages, Language Vitality and Endangerment (2003). The framework warns against using a single factor to assess vitality. It includes intergenerational transmission, speaker numbers and proportions, domains of use, new domains and media, education and literacy materials, institutional attitudes, community attitudes, and documentation. It also notes that multilingualism alone is not necessarily a threat. UNESCO Digital Library. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. KWF lists Rinkonada as “safe” and describes it as an Inland Bikol language whose speakers also commonly learn regional Bikol, Filipino, and English. KWF: Rinkonada. The same KWF repository separately documents endangered Inagta languages in the region, including Inagta Bikol and Agta Iraya. KWF list of endangered languages. ↩

10. Proclamation No. 1041, s. 1997 declared August 1 to 31 of every year Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa. Lawphil. ↩

11. Department of Education Memorandum No. 262, s. 2007 used the theme Maraming Wika, Matatag na Bansa and explicitly stated an objective of recognizing all languages of the Philippines as natural and social resources of the country. DepEd memorandum. ↩

12. This was not a formal national renaming of Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa. But Buwan ng mga Wika has been used institutionally in higher education. Ateneo de Zamboanga University’s Languages Department, for example, documented its annual Buwan ng mga Wika celebration in 2009. Ateneo de Zamboanga University. ↩