SENATOR Sherwin Gatchalian lamented that while the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education policy under the K to 12 Law mandates the use of learners’ first language as the medium of instruction for Grades 1 to 3, some schools end up using regional languages that children are unfamiliar with.

Gatchalian said that the MTB-MLE policy of the Department of Education only covers 19 languages.

The Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, however, lists down 130 languages, while the Philippine Statistics Authority’s 2020 Census of Population and Housing records 245 languages.

“My point is we’re supposed to start where the children are with 245 languages, but if we go to our schools, there are only 19 languages. That’s a big disconnect,” Gatchalian said.

“If we stay true to the essence of the law, then we have to be teaching in 245 languages, because that’s their mother tongue as enshrined in the law, but we’re only using 19,” he added.

“There’s a disconnect between the intention of the law and what we’re doing in the DepEd,” the senator said.

Gatchalian cited the Bicol Region where the United States Agency for International Development’s Advancing Basic Education in the Philippines Project conducted language mapping.

Results of the language mapping done in partnership with the Summer Institute of Linguistics identified 13 languages in the region.

Of the 19 languages covered by the MTB-MLE, however, only Central Bikol came from Region V. The USAID estimates that only 50 percent of learners in the region speak Central Bikol.

Despite the linguistic diversity in the Bicol region, the DepEd only distributed materials in Central Bikol and Tagalog.