My family, like most other families who lives in the province~ and moved to some provincial, regional, or national center (NCR in our case), has a few languages under our belt. My mom, for example, can speak

• Bicolano
  • Central Bicolano, specifically the one spoken in Legaspi City and Naga
    • she calls this Bicol "pure" or "standard" Bicolano
  • Sorsogon City Bicolano
  • Southern Sorsogon
    • this is her native language, since she grew up in that area
• Manila Tagalog
• English
  • she's fluent, though she makes minor grammatical errors here and there
    Her siblings have similar linguistic abilities. Her father, aka my maternal grandfather, also spoke Spanish, because it was taught in schools at the time.
    My father, on the other hand, can speak
• Southern Sorsogon Bicolano
  • not as well as my mom, since he moved to Manila during elementary
  • he forgets a few words here and there during long conversations, but he sounds indistinguishable to the people in Southern Sorsogon when he talks
• Manila Tagalog
  • this is the one he uses a lot
• English
  His sister (my aunt) and his mother (my paternal grandmother) speaks the same, though my grandmother I would say speaks Bicolano a whole lot better, and she's more used to British English since she's worked in Britain basically her whole life.

The languages of my parents', my relatives', and everyone else around me when I and my siblings grew up formed the base of our linguistic tapestry. Though, I grew up 16 hours away from my parents' Bicol, in Muntinlupa City and San Pedro City, I heard Bicolano--the South Sorsogon Bicolano, which we just called Bikol--often. It would flow like a stream from the grown-ups in our house. Whenever they spoke to each other, 100% of the time, it was Bicolano. My cousins from my mother's side also spoke that language when they visited--

Yet when they turned to us siblings, the shapes of their mouth would change. Bikol turned to Tagalog, as if suddenly, they were restricted by geography. Magayunun ineng mga daragita! turned into Ang gaganda nyo, mga ate! and we would respond back in Tagalog, even though everyone knew that we could understand Bicol well enough. It wasn't just us siblings that got this linguistic change. It started with us, then our younger cousins got the same treatment.

When grown-ups spoke, you were supposed to stay quiet and listen. So we listened when they spoke in Bicol, whether it was through late night phone calls, arguments, or afternoon chattering while our maternal grandaunt made halo-halo. We never spoke back in Bicol. At some point, my older sister could speak the same three languages that my father did. That faded pretty quickly. Some of them found our attempts to speak Bicol funny, because our accent was weird and we didn't know the words. Well, how could we? No one taught us. So we grew up speaking Tagalog of the National Capital Region, saday turned into maliit and mapinit--we never could remember if mapinit meant mainit (hot) or malamig (cold). Bicol became relegated to the language of our kamag-anak (our relatives), our parents, and whoever else lived in the house at that time, whether it was a housekeeper or a visiting relative.

We were still multilingual though. We shed the dialect (derogatory) of Bikolano and put on the shiny new language of English. While they found our attempts to speak Bicol a novelty at best and a derision at worse, they found our English to be fantastic. "English ispeaking yan!" was one of the things I heard often at reunions. One of my paternal grandmother's favorite stories about us, pakwan and

Related

• anecdotes about the fililpino languages