Pangasinan Language Essay

Pangasinan Language Revitalization and the Implementation of MTB-MLE Numerous efforts have been made to preserve and revitalize Pangasinan language. All these efforts resulted to various movements to preserve the Pangasinan language from the threat of language decay or from endangerment. In an article of Thomas Headland (2014) entitled Thirty endangered languages in the Philippines, he listed thirty-two Agta languages which are in extreme endangerment of language loss. Can this also happen to Pangasinan? In the past, a group of educators led by Atty. Luis F. Samson, founder of the University of Luzon in Dagupan City and then president of the Association of Private Schools, Colleges, and Universities (APSCU) in Region 1 established as group called “Save the Pangasinan Dialect Movement” (SPAM). This group responded to the fear that Pangasinan is a dying language since the 1930’s “when Ilokanos had dominantly settled in the province (Icasagi 1982). SPAM proposed a resolution to the Pangasinan Provincial Board making the teaching of Pangasinan language a compulsory in the elementary and high school curricula. The group called for an immediate action for the revitalization of Pangasinan in 1988. At present, even the

All these factors greatly affect the endangerment of Pangasinan as a statutory language in the province. Also in their article entitled Pangasinan- An Endangered language? A Retrospect and Prospect, Anderson and Anderson admitted that although Pangasinan is spoken by at least a million, it is still prone to endangerment because of increasing evidence of attrition, both in its population and in the number of communicative settings in which it is used. On the other side, Anderson and Anderson (2007) believed that a language can survive, they