‘The last Itneg speaker’

 Language

 

Via Amor Perillo

 

‘When a language fades, what do we lose?’ An unfamiliar sound echoes through the small room. The midday sun casts a warm yellow glow on the gathering of babaket—elderly women—engaged in their usual chatter over dark, bitter coffee.

Their voices carry a familiar warmth yet feel distant, their words flowing naturally between them but strangely foreign to me. Now, those echoes belong to a language that left with her.

When my grandmother passed away, so did the last fluent voice of our ancestors. No one in our family speaks Itneg anymore—not like she did.

And I wonder, how did we let it slip away? My grandmother often spoke to us in Ilocano, but with the babaket of our barangay, she spoke Itneg. Growing up, I watched her transform into another person whenever she spoke that language—it was like they had their own world, a secret language just for them.

Their words would rise and fall like a song only they knew, their laughter carrying the weight of shared understanding. As a child, I was curious, maybe even eager to learn, to catch a glimpse into that hidden world. But after she passed, that curiosity, that flicker of interest, was extinguished just as it had begun.

I started to notice it when I was in school. My classmates and I spoke Ilocano or Filipino, sometimes English, but never Itneg. It was a language reserved for the elderly, spoken only in quiet corners or family gatherings.

They never taught us, the younger generation, to learn and speak it, so we didn’t. At the time, I never questioned it. But now, I wonder—was it truly unintentional? Did they think it was unnecessary? Or was there something deeper?

My mother, who grew up in Baguio, barely spoke Itneg herself. She had left the mountains of Kalinga as a child, and with time, the language faded from her tongue. This is how it begins—not with deliberate rejection, but with distance.

One generation moves away, the next speaks less, and soon, a language disappears. Not with a grand farewell, but with silence. I wonder now if there was also a stigma attached to it, a quiet shame imposed by a world that valued mainstream languages over our own.

In school, we were encouraged to speak English. In cities, it was Filipino. Itneg, like so many other indigenous languages, was pushed further into the margins, its speakers dwindling year by year.

Experts say that when a language disappears, an entire way of life vanishes with it. According to UNESCO, a language disappears every two weeks, and by the end of the century, up to 90% of the world’s languages could be lost due to modernization, migration, and the dominance of major languages.

But for those who lose their language, it’s not just about words—it’s about losing a part of who they are. And yet, I have to admit something painful: I never really bothered to learn from her. If I had just gone up to my grandmother and asked her to teach me, maybe—just maybe—everything could have been different.

Maybe she wouldn’t have been the last speaker of Itneg in our family. Language is memory. It carries the songs of our ancestors, the wisdom of old stories, the traditions that have shaped us. When we stop speaking it, we stop hearing those voices. We forget. And that is the greatest loss of all.

But is it truly lost? Or is it simply waiting—faint, distant, but still there? My elder sister seems to think so. In her own quiet way, she is trying to learn Itneg. She listens to old recordings of our grandmother, repeats the words under her breath, and sometimes even asks the babaket about certain phrases. At first, they were surprised—amused, even. But then, I noticed something else. When she asked, they answered.

When she struggled, they corrected her with patience. The language that once filled the room with warmth and familiarity was beginning to breathe again, even if only in small whispers. And so, I wonder: is it truly gone, or is there still a chance to reclaim it?

Maybe languages don’t disappear all at once. Maybe they fade, waiting for someone—anyone—to bring them back. Maybe, if we listen closely, the echoes of our ancestors are still here, waiting to be heard again. – (Via Amor Perillo is a student of the Benguet State University)