Becoming Bisdak: An English Speaker’s Journey with and Analysis of the Cebuano Language, Culture, and People

I think it’s fair to say that we have all experienced at times that feeling of being the odd one out. Sometimes that’s a good thing, standing out and being unique. Other times not so much, we’d rather blend in with the group and be a part of the whole. Today I want to share my experience with becoming a part of a whole community, while starting from the very VERY outside. I’m talking about adopting an entire culture, lifestyle, way of thinking, and yes, even a language.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to serve as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Now don’t stop reading there, this isn’t going to be a religion focused discussion, I just have to give you some background information on how I ended up in a foreign country and give you some context for the lifestyle I was living.

Missionaries are assigned to different countries around the world with no personal influence or input on where they will be assigned. If assigned to a foreign country, you will almost always learn the language associated with the country. While there, you focus on talking to people, sharing the Gospel message, refraining from worldly entertainment. This meant no TV, no non-spiritually uplifting music, no smartphone, no emailing or phone calls(except 2 hours a week to talk with family and 2 Skype calls a year to family), and you are always with your companion, someone the same gender and who may or may not be from the country you’re in. When I was seventeen, I prepared my application, went through interviews, and received a letter with the information about where I’d be going. I remember vividly the shock of opening the letter on my bed, reading that I would be assigned to labor in the Philippines Cebu Mission. No joke, I had no idea where the Philippines was even located! Before I knew it, I graduated high school in June, turned eighteen in July, and started my mission August 8th, 2016 at the Missionary Training Center in Utah, along with a group of other missionaries headed for the same country. For the first six weeks, we studied the Cebuano language. We learned the basics for things like, hello, what’s your name, what time is it, essentially all the things you learned in a Spanish 1 or 2 class at an extremely accelerated pace, along with a bunch of phrases and terms specific to our labor, teaching the Gospel. Before we knew it, October 4th we landed in the Philippines and left with our new companions, traveling two by two and trying to talk with strangers who could only understand the most basic of English terms.

I spent two years in the Central Visayan region of the Philippines. During my time there, I became fluent in several dialects revolving around a secondary language known as Cebuano or Bisaya. Over time I came to understand better the reasons behind Cebuano Filipino ways of speaking, including plainness of speech, linguistic assimilation and physically engaging narrative.

It took a fair amount of time before I felt comfortable talking to other Filipinos in their own language. It was tough! I’d never spoken another language in my life, except when I was failing my way through Spanish in high school. But this was real life, I was actually trying to communicate with another society, another world. And I did it. I still don’t know how I was able to grasp the language, I can honestly only attribute that ability to a higher power. But the point is that when I did start communicating fluently with them, my world started adapting to theirs. Instead of trying to explain things with complicated terminology that couldn’t translate over, I learned how to communicate my ideas in their words. I learned to speak the way they speak, as in the mentality behind the words they chose. I literally stopped thinking like an American. I no longer thought in English, I would think in Cebuano.

The Cebuano language is quite possibly the lowest context class of language in the world, or at least in Asia. There is a caveat, however, to this statement. What I mean by this is the low context culture that exists in the language itself, separate from the extremely high context cultural norms present across other Philippine culture aspects. There are many physical actions that Filipinos perform which reflects the high context, but when it comes to speaking, you’ll never get a more blatant and clear statement than from a Filipino. For example, a cultural taboo of American society is not to point out “flaws” or personal things that people might be self-conscious about. We don’t discuss body weight, we don’t ask age, etc. In the Philippines, especially in the language strand of Cebuano, it is not uncommon to be asked these questions openly and without batting an eyelash. These are hardly considered personal or interrogative questions. Additionally, a Filipino may say something you find offensive which to them is merely a joke or statement. I will provide a personal example.

Upon my arrival home in the states in August 2018, I posted a picture on Instagram, showing that I had made it home alive and well. The very first comment to go on this picture was from a friend I’d made on the island of Negros. Her comment read, “Na nambok na lagi ka.” When directly translated, this reads, “You’ve already gotten obviously fat.” Imagine reading that comment on you next post! You and every friend who reads that would probably be mortified. But that’s just the way they speak, the way that I learned to speak. It can be shocking, once you learn how to speak their language. It’s a very straightforward approach. The Filipinos would call it a “gahi” (pronounced GA-HEE) or “hard” way of speaking. Hard, not as in difficult, but as in the physical sense, the way a rock is hard. Everything that comes out is what they mean. It’s very cut and dry, and the tone of voice they use can often be misinterpreted for anger or high energy. The reality is that the language itself has no substitute for “soft words.” There is no getting around it, you have to take their statements at face value. Accepting this way of speaking was a skill that I developed through actual use of the language. Once adopted, I began to understand that Cebuano communication is not a result of lack of thinking, but instead a lack of filler or flowery words existing in the language. This results in a highly contrasting style compared to the way we as Americans will create statements with less obvious implications.

This was how I learned to speak. Bit by bit, literally word by word (I had a notepad where I would write down new words and practice memorizing and using them in a sentence every day) I became Cebuano. I started developing an accent, I talked the way they did, I told stories the way they told stories, I sang their songs, I learned their expressions and sayings. Perhaps my proudest moments were the times when I would talk to someone and startle them! They would always say, “Ka mao diay ang Americano Mag-Binisaya”, meaning “The American knows how to speak Cebuano!” To which I would reply laughing, “Mao diay? Wa ko kibaw nga Bisaya akong ginastoriya karon,” which is to say, “Really? I had no idea I was speaking Bisaya right now!” I loved watching them laugh and ask questions, always fascinated by how Filipino I was, despite being American. They couldn’t believe it when I would eat their food, eat with my hands Filipino style (called kinamot which basically means “by hand” but only in reference to eating), tell them I did my laundry by hand, lived in a simple home, wasn’t rich, had no girlfriend (relentlessly I was asked this question and let me tell you it was exhausting), was only eighteen/nineteen, and had come simply to invite them to hear,consider, and act upon the Message we were sharing as missionaries. It was incredible, and even more fascinating to me was the complexity behind the communication culture I had joined. Allow me to explain what complexities came with assimilating to the Cebuano community.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Cebuano culture is the variety of dialect that exists in the language itself. The closest thing we can relate this to is the way in which varieties of English exist globally. England, America, Australia, South Africa, Canada and other primarily English-speaking nations all are based around the same grammar structure and rules of English but operate on different vocabularies. We might say windshield, someone else says windscreen. The meaning is the same, just said differently. In Cebuano culture, I found a similar circumstance in the region of islands that uses this language.

During my time in the Philippines I would find myself having conversations with people and having to ask what word they were using. Half the time it would be a different word for another word I had already learned on a different island but wasn’t used on the island I was now on! The difficulty that arises with this is that native Cebuano speakers can understand each other, but only to a certain extent. The solution to this Cebuano miscommunication issue was oddly enough resolved through the adoption of another language into their own: English. Cebuanos use a way of speaking called “code-switching”, rapidly changing between a primary and secondary language to communicate complex ideas and sentences. Cebuanos would be speaking their language when all of a sudden random English words would pop up like “cell phone”, “mall”, or even “I know, right?” It was the strangest thing to listen to and added to the “hard-style” of speaking they used.

An example of this phenomenon is as follows, and I ran into these scenarios all the time while learning the language. A solely Cebuano speaking native, who speaks no English whatsoever could say, “Pwede ba ka mobalik sa sunod? Sako kaayo ko karon.” This translates to “Can you come back next time? I’m very busy right now.” The Cebuano-English mixture sentence that would result if a Cebuano speaker was speaking to another Cebuano less familiar with the pure dialect would say, “Okay ra ba if mobalik lang ka sa next time? Busy kaayo ko ron.” This sentence results in the direct translation of, “Is it okay if you come back next time? I’m very busy today.” The complexity of the Cebuano language structure itself can be better understood from this example. As more and more English phrases are adopted by Cebuano speakers, bridges of global communication form, while the bridges tying them to their original language roots are slowly decaying. I found this so fascinating, and of course adopted the practice of code-switching in my own speaking. Depending on my geographical location, I would use more or less pure Cebuano, I would use slang, I would speak formally, sometimes I would speak just plain English because the Filipino I was speaking to had never learned to speak Cebuano, only English! Usually I would end up speaking sentences that were 85% Cebuano and 15% English. And for anyone wondering at this point, “How on earth did you understand anything,” let the record be clear I really didn’t understand clearly until about 6 months after arriving, and even then it could be difficult.

The last interesting aspect of the Cebuano language that I assimilated to is the physical expressiveness of speakers when relating stories or explaining a concept to an audience. Because of the increasing over simplification of their language, Cebuano speakers will often struggle to find proper words to express their ideas. In English we have approximately a quarter of a million (750,000) words at our disposal. Cebuanos have a rough estimate of about seventy thousand words (70,000), Imagine, you only have 9.3% of the entire English language to use in explaining concepts. A poet’s worst nightmare. You’d get by for a time but arrive at points impossible to explain verbally. The solution for the Cebuano people to this issue is the use of physical or body-language expression.

This is different from the English idea of body language, where we imply subtly our feelings or mental states through hand motions, posture, eye contact, etc. Cebuanos use what I can only best describe as their own form of sign language that often involves the use of the entire body. Or perhaps better, vocal charades. Once I was being told a story by a woman about how her husband came home drunk and tried grabbing her. For the sake of simplicity, I will translate it completely to English.

She said when he got home, his eyes were like “this”. He was walking like “this.” When he saw her, he pointed at her like “this.” Then he grabbed her like “that.” This is the story I was told if I translated it to English.

Each time I used the word “this” or “that” in the narrative was an instance in which the woman actually said the Cebuano word for “this/that” (kini/kana), but also performed a physical action as means of communication. Going back through the narrative we might say, his eyes were half open, he staggered back and forth as he walked, he pointed a crooked finger in her direction, and he grabbed her by the upper arm tightly. The woman relating the story to me, however, showed me what his eyes looked like by slightly closing her own. She swayed her body side to side to show me how he was walking. She pointed at me with a shaky hand. And yes, she even grabbed my own arm and squeezed it to help me understand how she had been grabbed. This practice is completely normal to the Cebuano speaker, whereas an American would be quite entertained or taken back at having such a vivid visual and physical interaction within a conversation.

The discrepancies between English and Cebuano are fascinating. There is such a large rift differentiating these languages and cultures from each other, it can somehow be felt. I remember experiencing literal, physical pain, usually a headache, when trying to think of the best way to express myself in Cebuano. Through my experiences I have learned that the ability of being an effective speaker in English has little significance when bringing those speaking skills to another culture. Cebuano is one of those cultures that carries complexity across every aspect. Note that we have only discussed the linguistic complexities that exist in the low-context, language blended, and physically expressive culture of the Cebuanos. Noted as well is that the Cebuano way of speaking, the language itself, is one out of 170 languages spoken in the Philippines.

To become a part of this community was one of the most rewarding feelings of my life. To become one of them, to become bisdak, meaning a true Cebuano or a Cebuano native, was incredible. It helped me realize how closed our communities are, and how much we ought to work to create links between them. In the same way that I worked to join the Cebuano community, we must all open our minds and expand our understanding of what it constitutes communication, and what it truly means to speak.