STATE of the Nation Addresses (SONAs) rarely place language itself at the center of political discussion. Presidents typically devote their annual addresses to the economy, infrastructure, education, health care, foreign policy and national security. Language, despite underpinning almost every aspect of governance, usually remains invisible. One notable exception came in President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s first SONA in 2022, when he argued that Filipinos’ command of English has long been a competitive advantage in the international labor market and suggested that the country’s medium of instruction should be continually reexamined to preserve that advantage.
Beyond that brief but significant discussion, however, language has seldom appeared as an explicit topic in the SONA. Yet language deserves attention even when it is not the subject of the speech. While the 2026 SONA says relatively little about language directly, it reveals a great deal through the president’s own language choices. Rather than asking what this year’s address tells us about language policy, it may be more revealing to ask how language itself was used to communicate policy particularly and vision broadly. When did the president choose Filipino? When did he switch to English? When did he mix the two languages? More importantly, what communicative purposes did those choices serve?
The first observation is perhaps the most revealing. Much of the substantive portion of the 2026 SONA was delivered in Filipino. It was in Filipino that the president reported on the flood control corruption investigations, assistance to overseas Filipino workers affected by the Middle East conflict, transport subsidies, agriculture, food security, education, health care, housing, pensions, and many other government programs. This immediately challenges the common assumption that English is the default language of governance in the Philippines. The transcript instead suggests that Filipino has become the principal language through which a president explains, justifies and accounts for government action before the nation.
English, by contrast, appears more selectively. Its distribution across the speech is far from random. Some of its more sustained passages occur when the president discusses digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI), energy strategy, foreign investment, international trade, regional diplomacy and the West Philippine Sea. Elsewhere, English appears in shorter but equally significant moments, such as when articulating broader policy principles, referring to legislation or delivering formally worded appeals. Rather than replacing Filipino, English functions as a strategically marked resource that often accompanies institutional abstraction, international engagement or ceremonial emphasis.
At first glance, one might conclude that English serves technical functions while Filipino carries emotional ones. The transcript of the 2026 SONA, however, presents a more nuanced picture. Many highly technical discussions — including taxation, infrastructure, agriculture, education and health care — are conducted extensively in Filipino. Conversely, English occasionally accompanies some of the speech’s most emotionally significant moments. The president’s direct address to the parents of students who recently lost their lives, for example, is delivered in English despite the surrounding discussion being largely in Filipino. Likewise, his emphatic call for the immediate amendment of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira) is expressed in English, demonstrating that English may also be used to convey institutional urgency and rhetorical force rather than merely technical detail.
The speech therefore resists a simple English-versus-Filipino binary. Instead, each language appears to index different communicative functions depending on context. Filipino frequently foregrounds democratic accountability, public explanation and solidarity with ordinary citizens. English often indexes institutional authority, international projection, technological modernity or formal statecraft. Yet these associations are not fixed. The significance of a language choice depends less on the language itself than on the communicative purpose it serves at a particular moment.
This becomes particularly evident in sections where the topic remains constant but the language changes. During the discussion of disaster preparedness, for instance, English is used to describe predictive systems, logistics and emergency infrastructure before the speech returns to Filipino to explain what these initiatives mean for affected communities. Similarly, the discussion of nuclear energy moves from English descriptions of national energy strategy to Filipino assurances about public safety and consumer welfare. The topic does not change; the communicative perspective does.
Viewed in this way, the alternation between Filipino and English is not simply a matter of code-switching. It is also a shift in communicative footing. At different moments, the president appears to speak in different institutional roles: as a technocrat explaining systems, an administrator reporting accomplishments, an advocate speaking for consumers, a diplomat addressing the international community or a fellow citizen speaking directly to “mga kababayan.” The change of language frequently coincides with these shifts in communicative identity.
The title of this column also includes language mixing, and the transcript provides abundant evidence of this third phenomenon. Even within predominantly Filipino passages, English lexical items remain deeply embedded in the discourse. Expressions such as “flood control,” “public-private partnership,” “service contract,” “system loss,” “income tax,” “AI” and numerous institutional names appear naturally within Filipino syntax without translation. This is not an indication of linguistic deficiency. Rather, it reflects the linguistic reality of contemporary Philippine public discourse, where English and Filipino routinely coexist within the same sentence. Political communication in the Philippines is therefore characterized not only by language choice and language switching but also by language mixing as an ordinary communicative practice.
This bilingualism mirrors everyday linguistic life in the Philippines. Filipinos regularly draw upon more than one language according to audience, purpose, topic and setting. Presidents are no exception. A SONA is delivered simultaneously to multiple audiences: legislators inside the chamber, citizens watching across the country, the bureaucracy responsible for implementing policy, diplomats, investors and international observers. It is therefore unsurprising that different portions of the speech foreground different linguistic resources. Language choice becomes a means of calibrating communication for these overlapping audiences.
SONAs may rarely discuss language directly, but language quietly shapes how every policy is presented, interpreted and remembered. The 2026 SONA reminds us that language is not merely the medium through which governments communicate. It is itself an instrument of governance. In a multilingual nation such as the Philippines, choosing one language over another — or blending both within the same discourse — is part of how governments construct authority, explain policy, build trust and negotiate their relationship with the people they serve.
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.