You're at your desk, waiting for the meeting to end, when someone accidentally unmutes herself. For about three seconds, everyone can hear her home behind the presenter's voice: a TV somewhere, a door opening, her dog barking, and her mom asking, "Anong gusto mong ulam, anak?", followed by her saying in a low voice, "Nasa meeting ako ma." Realizing it, she quickly says sorry and cuts the mic. The meeting returns to English and moves on. To those unfamiliar with the language, it sounds like a few random background noises. Most people on the call barely noticed it.
You did. You're sitting there, politely smiling at your camera. Something sparked in you that you can't really account for. It was a random co-worker; someone you barely interact with. Three seconds of somebody's mother asking what she wanted for dinner. That's all it was, and it wasn't even meant for you. It reached you anyway, before you had time to decide anything about it. For a moment you weren't at a desk in a country that isn't yours.
You've been working internationally for the last five years, alongside people whose languages and cultures are nothing like yours. Five years of saying "Yes" when what was actually in your mouth is "Opo". And those six random words from a colleague's kitchen and your whole body reacts.
People say that language is a bridge. And at that moment, it is; you felt it. But it was never that simple.
Looking closely, you see it; language has not been a bridge. Most of the time, it's how you determine who someone is, to know how you'll treat them.
Take Buwan ng Wika as an example; it's a month for the national language but ask a kid in Cebu or Iloilo or Ilocos what the national language is and the honest answer is: somebody else's, not their mother tongue. It's something they learn in school, the way you learn that math equation you never really have to use with your current situation.
When they finally make it to Manila for work, somebody laughs and taunts the way they speak, calls the accent cute, and repeats it back to them for weeks. They can't even get annoyed out loud about it, cause getting annoyed makes them the problem.
Honestly, English is worse.
English in our country is a trap with two doors. Speak it well, and you're arrogant, pasosyal, or nagmamarunong. Speak it badly, and it doesn't matter how right you are. Nobody is listening past that mistake. You've watched people who knew exactly what they were talking about shutting up and deciding it wasn't worth the trouble. That's the part that gets me; not the arguing; it's the number of people who just went quiet.
The internet makes it worse; "Ayusin mo muna yung grammar mo.", as a rebuttal in online discussions and forums. It's as if there's an entrance exam before you can voice an opinion.
The one thing that was supposed to belong to all of us turned into a way of ranking each other, which is a strange job to give a language.
You leave the country, and the whole system quietly stops working.
It's not because somebody abroad decided to be better at it. It's closer to arithmetic. At home, there are enough of us to sort into categories. Out here, there might be fifty of you in the city. The distance between Cebu and Pampanga stopped being a distance at all when you're the only two people in the room who know what the word means.
Something happens in rooms like ours that are hard to explain properly.
At this year's Music & Culture Festival, a place that brought together people who have nothing in common on paper. Different provinces, different countries, different arrival decades. Someone from Cebu, someone from Cavite, someone who's been here eleven years, and someone who just landed in March. Back home, these people may have never ended up at the same table. Here they are, passing food across.
Nobody needed to know what province you were from before deciding how to talk to you. Nobody asked who anyone voted for. Nobody flinched at anybody's English. And the question going around the room all night was whether you'd eaten yet.
The same question that came through the microphone. It's always that question.
That was the whole thing, then, not the grammar, not the accent, not the correct word from the dictionary. Just somebody asking if you've eaten, in whatever mix of Tagalog, and Bisaya, and English gets there fastest.
It's a bit sad that it took a few thousand kilometers to work that out. At home, we used the language to sort each other, educated or not, probinsyano or not, worth listening to or not. Out here, there are so few of us that being Filipino is enough.
Maybe that's the part nobody warns you about when you leave, not the money. Everyone warns you about the money. It's finding out that the language was never an exam you were passing or failing. It was just people checking on each other.
And that's what the language is, underneath everything we've done to it. It's not the correct spelling or the accent you flattened out. It's not the grammar insult that somebody throws at you to end an argument. It's the thing that lets one person ask another what they want for dinner.
Nobody puts "Anong gusto mong ulam, anak?" in a textbook. Nobody gets graded on it. And still, out of the entire language, that's the part that travels. Through a microphone somebody forgot to mute, into a meeting that had nothing to do with you, five years and a few thousand kilometers from the kitchen it was spoken in.
That's the one worth celebrating this month, not the language we were tested on, but the one that can still find us and bring us home.
Kumain ka na ba?
Drop your own "unmuted mic" moment in the comments — we're keeping the lounge table open all month.