Quezon City is now the country’s number one city, the most fertile ground among the urban centers, in the day-to-day nurturing and promotion of a language of unity for all Filipinos.
This and more about the Filipinos’ national language will be featured in the article “Lungsod ni Quezon, Lungsod ng Wika ng Pagkakaisa” in QC Ngayon, a special edition of the QC Now magazine, which is a quarterly publication of the QC Public Affairs and Information Services Office (PAISO).
Through PAISO, the QC government has come up with the special QC Now edition in Filipino, the national language, in celebration of the Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa, said PAISO head Gregorio T. Bañacia.
“It is a first- of- its-kind publication by a local government unit. Before QC Ngayon, all publications for this yearly celebration were done by private groups and the national government, not by the LGUs,” Bañacia said.
Copies of the QC Ngayon will be distributed primarily to public libraries, public schools and colleges in the city, the PAISO chief said.
He also said that the ceremonial first copy of QC Ngayon will be presented to Mayor Herbert M. Bautista on Friday, August 19, during the commemoration of the 133rd birth anniversary of President Manuel Luis Quezon, the father of Wikang Pambansa.
The QC Ngayon feature article says: “ Quezon City has become the growth center of the Wikang Filipino, being the most populous in the Philippines ’ most fertile ground for the development of a national language based on all the existing indigenous languages of the country. That fertile ground is the heartland of the combined areas of two big administrative regions in Luzon: Central Luzon (Region 3) and Calabarzon (Region 4-A). Except for the province of Pampanga in Central Luzon, practically all the cities and provinces of the two big regions are Tagalog-speaking areas. In Quezon City, the Tagalog spoken nowadays is no longer pure Tagalog. Settlers from the provinces, particularly from the non-Tagalog regions, are also contributing greatly, as did the Tagalog speakers during the 1940s and 1950s, to the continuing growth of the national language.”
In short, “the everyday wikang pambansa that we have and we are using here in Quezon City is no longer the Tagalog-based, it has evolved to a language of both the Tagalog and the non-Tagalog speakers — or, as we should now say, our language of unity,” Bañacia said. “You can hear it being spoken in every neighborhood in QC where, in reality, the Tagalog residents are now becoming a minority,” he added. Mencio/ Ej/ Maureen Quiñones, PAISO
