it’s really too bad that we haven’t tried hard enough as a people to develop tagalog into a national language. then maybe we would have a better sense of national interests as opposed to foreign interests, and we could be making decisions among ourselves first before outsiders with vested interests start weighing in.
read Rizal’s open secrets by john nery. rizal and del pilar in their correspondence 1889 to 1890 turned from spanish to tagalog for a “layer of privacy”, “to wrap something in (or bind themselves to) secrecy”, and “to forge a unity of purpose” at a time when “the question of language was becoming more and more central to their attempt to found a nation.”
read too dr. pablo s. trillana III‘s Rizal and leadership.