They Mark You Down for Speaking the Language You Actually Use

You write an essay in Taglish and the teacher bleeds red ink all over it. "Use proper English," the margin says. You rewrite it in stiff, textbook sentences that sound like nobody you know. You get a better grade.

This happens in high school. It happens in college. It happens in job applications where you're told to be "professional," which really means: erase how you actually talk.

Taglish isn't code-switching gone wrong. It's not lazy English or broken Tagalog. It's the linguistic reality of growing up bilingual in a country where English is an official language and Tagalog is what your lola speaks at home. The switching isn't random. There are rules. There's grammar. There's a reason "Ang hirap ng exam" hits different from "The exam was difficult."

But the education system still treats it like a problem to fix. English class penalizes Tagalog words. Filipino class penalizes English words. You're supposed to keep them separate, like they don't live in the same brain.

Meanwhile, this is how group chats work. This is how memes work. This is how you explain complex ideas to friends, mixing languages because sometimes "kilig" is more precise than any English equivalent, and sometimes "deadline" is clearer than "takdang panahon." You're not being sloppy. You're being efficient.

The bias shows up in hiring, too. Call center training drills the Taglish out of you. Corporate emails get flagged if you slip into natural phrasing. Broadcasters code-switch all the time, but student journalists get points deducted for it. The message is clear: Taglish is for the streets, not for serious work.

Except it is serious work. It's how contracts get explained to clients who don't speak pure English. It's how teachers reach students who zone out during straight English lectures. It's how doctors talk to patients in provincial hospitals. It's the language of getting things done.

Some linguists have been saying this for years: Taglish is a language in its own right, with its own internal logic. But academic institutions are slow to catch up. They're still grading based on a colonial standard that treats English fluency as the benchmark of intelligence.

You shouldn't have to choose between sounding like yourself and getting a decent grade. The language you use to think, joke, argue, and comfort your friends isn't lesser. It's not a phase you outgrow when you get "educated."

It's just how you speak. And the system that marks you down for it is the one that needs fixing.