Word Fiesta - Filipino

06/06/2026

🕊️Losing your family’s language can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration, Kat Chow writes for The Atlantic, but it’s one she wants to prevent.

Chow’s parents migrated to the United States from China in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her parents spoke Cantonese and Taishanese but were also fluent in English. When Chow’s older sister Steph was in kindergarten, she requested that their parents speak only in English, and her parents acquiesced. Over time, Chow's ability to speak Cantonese faded.

Chow’s parents migrated to the United States from China in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her parents spoke Cantonese and Taishanese but were also fluent in English. When Chow’s older sister Steph was in kindergarten, she requested that their parents speak only in English, and her parents acquiesced.

What Chow and her sisters experienced is called language attrition: the forgetting of a language by a once-proficient speaker and a family’s subsequent intergenerational dilution of the skill. Reversing language attrition is “really about ‘time’ with that language—and ‘high-quality’ time,” Krista Byers-Heinlein, a psychology professor who studies infant development and language acquisition, told Chow. Byers-Heinlein estimates that children need between 20 to 25 percent of their waking time with high-quality interactions in order to learn a language.

“The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort,” Chow continues. Betty Choi taught her kids their heritage languages, Chinese and Korean, as she was learning them herself. She cycled through different methods: enrolling herself in language classes; seeking out multilingual child-care providers; and exposing her children to books, songs, and videos in those languages, before she ended up creating her own curriculum.

Another parent Chow spoke with, Hieu Truong, is slowly introducing her son to Vietnamese while being realistic about the ease of bilingualism: “I want him, when he talks to his older relatives, to know how to properly greet them—know how to say ‘Thank you.’”

“This is what I want for any potential children of mine, too,” Chow continues. “I don’t desire fluency for them merely to compensate for what I lost as a kid. Rather, I yearn for them to have a closeness to the culture and the little joys of everyday life that such proximity can reveal.”

Full essay in the comments.

19/05/2026

Thanks for the feature Icon Jen Chua 🥰

29/04/2026

25/04/2026

I got to share my story with icon of The Pinoy Expat ☺️ it was a privilege to share the inspiration and motivation behind Word Fiesta - Filipino 🇵🇭

2 likes. "Lumaki sa Australia pero mahusay mag-Tagalog?! | Pinoy migrant story | The Pinoy Expat"

14/04/2026

April is Filipino Food Month 🇵🇭✨

Food is such a big part of who we are as Filipinos—it brings people together, sparks conversation, and keeps our traditions alive across generations.

Check out the food featured on our flashcards—little glimpses of the flavours we all know and love - from ulam to desserts.

What’s your favourite Filipino 🇵🇭 food?

02/04/2026

Designed with intention—not just to teach words, but to help kids connect 🤍
When characters feel familiar, kids engage more and learning becomes easier.

Plus, it’s a simple way to introduce Filipino culture alongside the language—because you really can’t have one without the other.

💛 What do you recognise?

06/02/2026

There’s something so poetic about the Filipino language. Here is a throwback of me singing “Panunumpa” by Carol Banawa for my cousin’s wedding 12 years ago (hence the video quality) hehe

This song is about a “vow”, a “promise of love, dedication and commitment”. 💕

12/04/2025

Yay! Good job little Facundo hehe
Thanks for sharing The Mommy Roves 🤩

30/03/2025

It can be hard to describe that feeling of being overcome by the unbearable cuteness of a fluffy little cat or a chubby-cheeked baby. But there’s now an official word for it in English: gigil.

Borrowed from Tagalog, one of the primary languages of the Philippines, gigil is among 42 words that are untranslatable or have no direct English equivalents that have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in March.

Gigil (pronounced “ghee-gill”), which the OED says dates to 1990 and is also used in Philippine English, refers to a feeling “so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable,” according to the OED’s latest update.

It can be used both as a noun identifying the feeling itself as well as an adjective for a person experiencing that feeling, as in “I’m so gigil.”

Read more: nbcnews.app.link/NEOSMuIb5Rb

08/02/2025

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