ABSTRACT
Under the impact of economic, political, and cultural globalisation, it could be expected that the world will become increasingly homogeneous, with a convergence of cultures. Paradoxically, however, through weakening the authority and appeal of the nation-state (Eisenstadt, 2001), globalization has generated forces that counteract at least some of its homogenizing effects. As various aspects of control slip out of its grasp, the state faces the rising demands of its local, regional, and other minority groups, which are gaining confidence and demanding their place in the sun (Grant, 1997; Safran, 1995; Smolicz, 1998). With voices of protest against linguistic assimilation rising from a great variety of indigenous minorities around the world (SkutnabbKangas & Phillipson, 1994, 1998), regional linguistic groups have been particularly self-assertive in Catalonia, the Basque country, Quebec, Flanders, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. Yet in the chorus of demands for language rights regarding the teaching of home languages in the school and their use as lan-
guages of instruction, the voices of Philippine linguistic communities other than Tagalog have been noticeably silent (Smolicz, 1986).
