ON the eighth day of the Senate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, a single moment of translation did more legal work than a page of cross-examination. Defense counsel Mark Vinluan, questioning National Bureau of Investigation director Melvin Matibag on testimony the defense considered secondhand, reached for a Tagalog equivalent of the English legal term hearsay. The word he chose was tsismis.
It is worth pausing on that choice, not to adjudicate its legal merit — that is for the senator-judges — but to notice what it reveals about how language functions inside a courtroom and inside a nation watching that courtroom on live television. As a linguist, I am less interested in whether Vinluan’s translation was doctrinally exact than in what the act of translating accomplished. Translation, like testifying, objecting or admonishing a witness, is never merely descriptive. It performs social actions.
This insight has been central to the philosophy of language since J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, later developed by John Searle. Austin distinguished three dimensions of speaking that occur simultaneously. There is the locutionary act — the words uttered and their literal meaning; the illocutionary act — what a speaker accomplishes by uttering those words; and the perlocutionary act — the effects those words produce in those who hear them.
Applied to Day 8 of the ongoing impeachment trial, the locutionary content of Vinluan’s question was straightforward: he asked Matibag to account for testimony about an investigation launched before Matibag assumed his post. But the illocutionary force of rendering hearsay as tsismis was something else entirely. In Philippine everyday speech, tsismis does not carry the clinical detachment of a rule of evidence. It evokes unverified talk, stories that circulate through repetition rather than verification. To call testimony tsismis is therefore not merely to invoke Rule 130 of the Rules of Court. It is to perform an act of diminishment, recasting a government official’s sworn account in the vocabulary of neighborhood gossip before a national audience that instinctively understands what tsismis means, whether or not it has ever read the Rules of Evidence.
Translation, however, is never simply a matter of finding lexical equivalents. Every translation is also a framing device. Had Vinluan chosen sabi-sabi, haka-haka or another colloquial expression, each would have activated a somewhat different cultural understanding. By choosing tsismis, he selected the term with perhaps the strongest everyday association with unreliable talk. The translation therefore did more than render an English legal term into Tagalog. It framed how the testimony itself could be understood.
This is what Searle would call an indirect speech act: a question on its surface, but functionally an assertion — an assertion that the witness’ testimony belonged to the register of gossip rather than of fact. Its perlocutionary force became immediately visible. Within minutes, the phrase had spread across social media, quoted, screenshotted and debated independently of the trial’s substantive record. Whatever else happened on Day 8 — and much did, including a separate exchange in which presiding officer Francis Escudero reminded Matibag to refrain from making statements about individual members of the impeachment court — it was the tsismis line that many people remembered.
It is not incidental that this happened inside a courtroom. Legal proceedings are, structurally, dense concentrations of speech acts, arguably more so than almost any other institutional setting. A witness’ sworn testimony is what Searle classifies as an assertive: a commitment to the truth of a proposition, reinforced by the further speech act of the oath itself — a declarative that changes the speaker’s legal standing the moment it is uttered. A judge’s ruling to sustain or overrule an objection is likewise declarative in the strongest sense: saying it makes it so within the institution, much as saying “I now pronounce you married” creates a marriage. An admonition from the presiding officer is a directive, an attempt to govern future conduct through words alone. Even silence, in a courtroom, can function as a speech act by omission when a witness declines to answer under privilege.
Understood this way, Vinluan’s translation was not a casual shift into Tagalog amid an otherwise English legal proceeding. It was a strategic act performed in the register best suited to its illocutionary purpose. Legal English, for all its precision, is a register acquired through specialized training; it does not automatically travel into the cultural terrain where credibility is won or lost in the public mind. Tsismis performs that work almost instantly because it activates a cultural schema that Filipinos recognize without legal training.
None of this is to say that translating hearsay as tsismis was accurate or inaccurate, fair or unfair, as a matter of law. That determination belongs properly to the impeachment court and, more broadly, to legal scholars competent to weigh it against the technical requirements of the hearsay rule, which concerns out-of-court statements offered for the truth of the matter asserted, not merely gossip in the colloquial sense. The two categories overlap but are not identical. That lexical slippage is itself rhetorically consequential, regardless of who makes it or against whom.
What linguistics can offer, impartially, is a vocabulary for describing how the moment worked, independent of whom it favored. Every actor in an impeachment trial — the prosecutor, defense counsel, witness, presiding officer and even the journalists transcribing it live — is performing speech acts whose force often exceeds their literal content. Recognizing this does not tell us who is right. It tells us why certain words, and not others, become the ones a nation remembers the next morning.
Language, in a proceeding this consequential, is never simply the medium through which the trial is reported. It is part of what the trial is.
Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is a public intellectual, language scholar and migrant advocate. He is one of the leading researchers on English in the Philippines and one of the pioneers of migration linguistics. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at age 23, from De La Salle University, and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Singapore. He is currently associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
It is worth pausing on that choice, not to adjudicate its legal merit — that is for the senator-judges — but to notice what it reveals about how language functions inside a courtroom and inside a nation watching that courtroom on live television. As a linguist, I am less interested in whether Vinluan’s translation was doctrinally exact than in what the act of translating accomplished. Translation, like testifying, objecting or admonishing a witness, is never merely descriptive. It performs social actions.
This insight has been central to the philosophy of language since J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, later developed by John Searle. Austin distinguished three dimensions of speaking that occur simultaneously. There is the locutionary act — the words uttered and their literal meaning; the illocutionary act — what a speaker accomplishes by uttering those words; and the perlocutionary act — the effects those words produce in those who hear them.
Applied to Day 8 of the ongoing impeachment trial, the locutionary content of Vinluan’s question was straightforward: he asked Matibag to account for testimony about an investigation launched before Matibag assumed his post. But the illocutionary force of rendering hearsay as tsismis was something else entirely. In Philippine everyday speech, tsismis does not carry the clinical detachment of a rule of evidence. It evokes unverified talk, stories that circulate through repetition rather than verification. To call testimony tsismis is therefore not merely to invoke Rule 130 of the Rules of Court. It is to perform an act of diminishment, recasting a government official’s sworn account in the vocabulary of neighborhood gossip before a national audience that instinctively understands what tsismis means, whether or not it has ever read the Rules of Evidence.
Translation, however, is never simply a matter of finding lexical equivalents. Every translation is also a framing device. Had Vinluan chosen sabi-sabi, haka-haka or another colloquial expression, each would have activated a somewhat different cultural understanding. By choosing tsismis, he selected the term with perhaps the strongest everyday association with unreliable talk. The translation therefore did more than render an English legal term into Tagalog. It framed how the testimony itself could be understood.
This is what Searle would call an indirect speech act: a question on its surface, but functionally an assertion — an assertion that the witness’ testimony belonged to the register of gossip rather than of fact. Its perlocutionary force became immediately visible. Within minutes, the phrase had spread across social media, quoted, screenshotted and debated independently of the trial’s substantive record. Whatever else happened on Day 8 — and much did, including a separate exchange in which presiding officer Francis Escudero reminded Matibag to refrain from making statements about individual members of the impeachment court — it was the tsismis line that many people remembered.
It is not incidental that this happened inside a courtroom. Legal proceedings are, structurally, dense concentrations of speech acts, arguably more so than almost any other institutional setting. A witness’ sworn testimony is what Searle classifies as an assertive: a commitment to the truth of a proposition, reinforced by the further speech act of the oath itself — a declarative that changes the speaker’s legal standing the moment it is uttered. A judge’s ruling to sustain or overrule an objection is likewise declarative in the strongest sense: saying it makes it so within the institution, much as saying “I now pronounce you married” creates a marriage. An admonition from the presiding officer is a directive, an attempt to govern future conduct through words alone. Even silence, in a courtroom, can function as a speech act by omission when a witness declines to answer under privilege.
Understood this way, Vinluan’s translation was not a casual shift into Tagalog amid an otherwise English legal proceeding. It was a strategic act performed in the register best suited to its illocutionary purpose. Legal English, for all its precision, is a register acquired through specialized training; it does not automatically travel into the cultural terrain where credibility is won or lost in the public mind. Tsismis performs that work almost instantly because it activates a cultural schema that Filipinos recognize without legal training.
None of this is to say that translating hearsay as tsismis was accurate or inaccurate, fair or unfair, as a matter of law. That determination belongs properly to the impeachment court and, more broadly, to legal scholars competent to weigh it against the technical requirements of the hearsay rule, which concerns out-of-court statements offered for the truth of the matter asserted, not merely gossip in the colloquial sense. The two categories overlap but are not identical. That lexical slippage is itself rhetorically consequential, regardless of who makes it or against whom.
What linguistics can offer, impartially, is a vocabulary for describing how the moment worked, independent of whom it favored. Every actor in an impeachment trial — the prosecutor, defense counsel, witness, presiding officer and even the journalists transcribing it live — is performing speech acts whose force often exceeds their literal content. Recognizing this does not tell us who is right. It tells us why certain words, and not others, become the ones a nation remembers the next morning.
Language, in a proceeding this consequential, is never simply the medium through which the trial is reported. It is part of what the trial is.
Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is a public intellectual, language scholar and migrant advocate. He is one of the leading researchers on English in the Philippines and one of the pioneers of migration linguistics. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at age 23, from De La Salle University, and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Singapore. He is currently associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
