Spanish Influence among Filipinos: A Sociolinguistic Theory

Spanish colonialism has led to raising a significant issue of how much influence Filipino millennials have felt from it until today, particularly on our language, culture, and identity. Several research undertakings have been conducted, but there was rare to none that is conducted specifically for the prevalence of Spanish Colonialism through a linguistic perspective in the Visayan Region, which becomes the drive of the conduct of this research. This paper aimed to explore the prevalence of Spanish influence through linguistic perspective among Visayan college freshmen. The study used qualitative design employing the interpretative phenological method of investigation to offer insights into how informants make sense of a given situation. Seven (7) informants were purposively and conveniently selected for an in-depth interview to elicit the necessary information. The qualitative data gathered from the interviews were transcribed and encoded using a word document to tabulate and generate codes with their emerging themes. The study revealed seven themes which are: Religious Practice and Language Use; Cultural Transmission; Familiarity with the Spanish Language; Variation of Affective Impressions; Comfortability of Using the Language and Preference of Learning the Native Visayan Language; Assimilation of Spanish Mentality and its Influences to our Language, Culture and Identity; and Confirmation of Spanish influence. It was concluded then that Spanish Colonialism is still prevalent today from a sociolinguistic perspective, in other words, the confirmation of the relationship between language and culture. The intertwined relationship between these two makes the Spanish colonization very alive and prevalent up until today, which was keenly used by the colonizer to maintain their holds on the colonized. The results of this study could generate efforts to revive our language and culture because doing so is tantamount to reviving our own identity as Visayan Filipino. However, we will still continue to assimilate or conform to what we are used to speaking. Certainly, the beauty with the effort of preservation will enrich our language and culture as the trend of assimilating the Spanish one goes on.