STATISTICS: THE SPANISH LANGUAGE
IN THE PHILIPPINES
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2. NUMBERS FROM VARIOUS SOURCES
AGUSTIN CAVADA, MANUEL ARELLANO Y LUCIANO DE LA ROSA

FROM AGUSTÍN DE CAVADA TO MALOLOS

Let us now examine the statistics. It is true that when the Philippines had a population of just a little over four million and a half (4,500,000 persons), Agustín de la Cavada y Méndez de Vigo pointed out that those who spoke Spanish did not exceed 2.8% of the cited population. However, this book of statistics was published in 1870, just seven years after Queen Isabel II had decreed (1863) the establishment of the public school system in all the Islands, whose medium of instruction was predominantly Spanish, with the most important languages of the Archipelago serving as auxiliary educational vehicles.

By the year 1898, when the Philippines separated from Spain, the percentage of Spanish-speaking Filipinos must have already increased considerably. And if, in fact, the increase in the number of Spanish speakers had not grown in greater proportions and with a larger extension in all these islands from the extant 2.8% in 1870, the Filipino delegates at the constitutional convention in Malolos, Bulacán in 1898 would not have declared Spanish as the first official language of the Philippine Republic, just as it was established by the Malolos Constitution. Neither would the Filipinos in the Aguinaldo government have used Spanish in all their proclamations and official publications, including the newspaper La Independencia.

José Rizal, a polyglot who knew seven languages including Tagalog, would not have written his most important works in Spanish; he would have written them in English and Tagalog – but no, José Rizal wrote it all in Spanish for his countrymen who, naturally, could read him in this same language.

MANUEL ARELLANO REMONDO

In a book published in 1908 by the Typographic College of Santo Tomás in Manila, entitled General Geography of the Philippine Islands, whose author is the Very Reverend Father Fray Manuel Arellano Remondo, the following information is found on page 15:

"The population decreased due to the wars, in the five-year period from 1895 to 1900, since, at the start of the first insurrection, the population was estimated at 9,000,000, and at present (1908), the inhabitants of the Archipelago do not exceed 8,000,000 in number."
The referenced "first insurrection" was the one that took place on August 29, 1896 against the Spanish government. In that case, the population of the Philippines totaled nine million inhabitants. The North American census of 1903 and of 1905 mention that the Spanish speakers of this archipelago have never exceeded in number 10% of the population during the final decade of the 1800’s. This means that 900,000 Filipinos – 10% of the nine million cited by Fr. Manuel Arellano Remondo – spoke Spanish as their first and only language.

LUCIANO DE LA ROSA, KATIPUNERO

Aside from these 900,000, Don Luciano de la Rosa, the defense lawyer of those who were taken to court for libel because of the editorial in the newspaper El Renacimiento entitled Aves de Rapiña  (Birds of Prey), published in 1907, concluded – in a study we cited in the book Filipino: Origin and Connotations (Manila 1960), "...that 60% of the Filipinos" in his time "had Spanish language as their second language."

If we add to this 60% the preceding 10%, we have 70% of the Filipino population as making daily use of the Spanish language between 1890 and 1940. Recent studies by Dr. José Rodríguez Ponga indicate that at the time of the withdrawal of peninsular Spaniards from the country, a total of 14% of the population were Spanish-speaking Filipinos (i.e., 14% of 9,000,000 or 1,260,000).