The War of Translation: Colonial Education, American English, and Tagalog Slang in the Philippines
Vicente L. Rafael The Journal of Asian Studies / FirstView Article / March 2015, pp 1 - 20 DOI: 10.1017/S0021911814002241, Published online: 24 March 2015 This paper examines the role of language in nationalist attempts at decolonization. In the case of the Philippines, American colonial education imposed English as the sole medium of instruction. Native students were required to suppress their vernacular languages so that the classroom became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation.