Article 1:

Coping with the Bisaya Accent

And since there are quite a lot of Visayans in greater Metro Manila, the accent is heard almost
everywhere every day. Tricycle drivers being interviewed by roving news teams, senior executives
chairing meetings, lawmakers at their filibustering best, salespeople at the malls. In many a city scene,
someone rolls the Visayan accent, and someone else mimics it. Or giggles, at the least. The Bisaya sound
is standard fare in radio, television, and the movies — the stereotypical way of portraying housemaids
or "hillbillies" who are new to city life.

For Lisa, a housewife who has lived in the Land of Promise for more than 30 years, moving to Manila in
1997 was one of the hardest adjustments she had ever made. Learning the Tagalog language was tough
for someone like her who was born and raised in Samal Island province of Davao del Norte. She and her
husband decided to move to the big city for good to give their two daughters the good education they
deserved. The moment they arrived in Manila; her Mindanao twang suddenly needed a drastic
makeover.

"Being a Bisaya in Manila was very challenging, especially during the first six months. The traffic,
pollution, and need to adjust to a new language that I wasn’t familiar with were major difficulties. Every
day I would get a headache from trying to converse in Tagalog with my neighbors and people at the
market. Honestly, I would have left the city the day after we arrived were it not for my family," the
Davao native explains.
Tagalog, on which Filipino, the national language, is based, is widely used on the island of Luzon,
particularly in the Metropolitan Manila area. Lisa's experience made her feel that Bisaya was inferior to
Tagalog. She was often misunderstood when buying an item at a store, and she would often hear
mocking comments about her quirky pronunciation. The most disparaging remark she has ever heard is
that Bisaya is “low-class” compared to Tagalog. Perhaps this is because of the way TV portrays speakers
of the language. But despite all the discrimination she has endured, Lisa has maintained her equanimity
among those who ridiculed her language.

To learn Tagalog quickly, she tuned in to local radio stations and imitated the way Tagalog was spoken.
She read books and mingled with people to beef up her vocabulary. She gained new friends who not
only helped her adjust to the new language, but also assisted her in coping with the stressful life in the
city. In just six months, Lisa, who had spoken nothing but Bisaya for more than 30 years before migrating
to Manila, had managed to absorb the new language and ditch her Visayan accent. She confesses,
though, that the “funny” Visayan accent still slips out from time to time. Nevertheless, she feels lucky
and confident now about her ability to communicate and switch back and forth between the two
languages.

The truth is, no language is inferior or superior to another. Diversity is, after all, what makes our country
unique and attractive to many people around the world. Many Filipinos are bilingual or even multilingual
because the country boasts more than 100 languages or dialects. We should all be proud of all of our
languages.
Article 2:
Several reasons why Filipino cuisine is among least preferred worldwide
By Jeline Malasig - March 20, 2019 - 6:03 PM
Despite the international attention it has been getting, Filipino food was ranked among the least popular
cuisines in a recent survey conducted by a London-based global market research firm. YouGov surveyed
over 24,000 participants from 24 countries on their most preferred cuisine and Filipino dishes came in
among the least favored meals. It received the lowest mark among the Japanese, whose preference for
the Filipino cuisine was only 21 percent.

Australians, on the other hand, had the highest preference of the cuisine at 56 percent, second to the
Filipinos themselves. We asked 25,000 people in 24 countries how much they liked 34 national cuisines.
Here are the top 5: 1. Italian cuisine - average of 84% in each country who have tried it say they like it, 2.
Chinese - 78%, 3. Japanese - 71%, 4. Thai - 70%, and 5. French - 70%.

“We asked people which of 34 national cuisines they had tried and whether they liked or disliked them,
with Italian food being the most well-liked. The cuisine received an average popularity score of 84%
across the 24 nations we studied,” Matthew Smith, a lead data journalist, reported. Other least favored
cuisines in the world are Saudia Arabian, Finnish and Peruvian.
Filipino cuisine is heavily influenced by different countries such as Spain, the United States, China, India
and other Southeast Asian nations. It is considered the original “Asian fusion” before the concept
existed, as stated by Smithsonian Magazine.

A food-oriented blog in July 2016 revealed various reasons as to why Filipino dishes do not seem to
appeal to foreigners despite international features about it. JP Anglo, a chef and patron at Sara Kitchen,
noted that “Pinoy ingredients are hard to come by outside of the Philippines.” “You can’t get tuba,
Batwan etc. overseas. Even the lemon grass tastes different,” he shared. Myke Sarthou, a chef and
cookbook author, attributed it to the complexity of the cuisine as a whole.

According to him, Filipino cuisine does not merely mix and match ingredients and different cooking
methods of foreign dishes. One must also understand how the “perspectives and philosophies” of
various cultures blend as well. This makes the Filipino cuisine difficult to describe in just a line or two, he
said. Sarthou also claimed that the country lacks the “marketing and business acumen” required to
make local dishes popular in a global sense, as well as the Philippines’ lack of support in the agricultural
sector. “To make a cuisine shine globally, it should be backed by a strong agricultural sector which is
evidently weak in the country,” the chef said.
A restaurant owner based in New York City attributed it to the Filipinos’ supposed lack of
entrepreneurial skills necessary to make the cuisine recognized in the international market. “We were
not raised to be entrepreneurs. We were raised to be doctors, lawyers — risk-averse careers,” Nicole
Ponseca said. She speculated that it might be due to the Filipinos’ sense of shame towards their own
cuisine brought about by being heavily colonized for so many centuries. “That’s why [some restaurants]
give the ‘white-man menu’ [to customers] because they think they’re not going to like dinuguan, which
is a pork blood stew,” Ponseca said. “It is because when you’re colonized over so many years, you don’t
value your own culture, even though we have so much pride,” she continued.