More Than a Subtitle: Accuracy Is the Minimum Standard for Prestige TV

As the daughter of two proud Ilonggos from Bacolod City, born and raised in Metro Manila, English has always been my first language. But the language that I loved in a way that made me want to get the punto right? That was Ilonggo. Hiligaynon. 

This was the language my family spoke at home. This was also the language that was, for years, dismissed as a dialect. So, when I pursued graduate studies in Language and Literature at DLSU in the mid-2000s after finishing my Behavioral Science degree, I was relieved that the World Englishes class I attended taught me to articulate and interrogate how Tagalog and Hiligaynon have different linguistic roots that are as distinct from each other as Spanish and Italian. You wouldn’t subtitle an Italian aria as [Singing in Spanish] just because they both use the word amor. It’s as ridiculous as conflating Asians to a single look, feel, and sound in 2026.

And yet, here we are.

According to the December 2025 release of the Philippine Statistics Agency data for overseas Filipino workers, 9.5% hail from Western Visayas, ranked 3rd after CALABARZON and Central Luzon; Metro Manila ranks fourth at 8.6%. While critics may argue these numbers still appear representative of Luzon, the reality is that policy is finally catching up to a reality that many multilingual Filipinos wish we’d had before the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 (RA 10533) formally institutionalized the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). For context, this law took effect when I was already in my sixth year working and wrestling with the night shift in the BPO sector after I graduated college in 2007.

The 1974 Bilingual Education Policy mandated English and Pilipino (Tagalog) as the sole media of instruction, leaving regional languages as an unintended afterthought. It would take forty years for research data to argue that the standardization of the 70s had correlations to dropout rates outside of Metro Manila. RA 10533 was the legal turning point that shifted the burden from children onto educational institutions to adapt to the child’s mother tongue so that the conceptual frameworks of the maths and sciences could be understood and internalized. Education should be about facilitating access, not just memorization.

Multi-lingual households are more the norm than the exception in the Philippines. English and Tagalog are mandatory because education and doing business have made it a necessity. But news updates like a recent fire in Iloilo City documented on a Facebook livestream? Reportage is done in the regional language so people get what they need to know when they need it at the time they need it.

The University of the Philippines makes it a point to ensure that each region is represented so much that because I was born, raised and educated in Manila, my chances were statistically lower because of the University’s commitment to regional equity. If our national university recognizes that “Filipino” is a composite identity that must honor each region, why can’t a multi-million dollar production do the same

I am not here to pit the islands against each other in terms of who brings home the most remittances or the most pride. I am here to argue that when the source of our individual songs is mislabeled, we erase the identity of nearly 1 in 10 members of the diaspora. This is what people mean when the shorthand critique of “Imperial Manila” is thrown like a gauntlet. This country makes it nearly impossible to have a calm conversation about the very human desire to be understood.

Any attempt to question the status quo devolves into perceived defensiveness when we should be asking why the status quo continues to treat the reclamation of our specific roots as an act of sentimentality rather than a correction of a historical error.

Writer Valerie Chu has said that The Pitt is a show that values character over jargon, and yet, somewhere in the production pipeline of the episode, that character was stripped of its specific identity.

To the world, Filipinos everywhere are reduced to a Tagalog-speaking monolith—a flattened shorthand that erases the very regions providing the backbone of global healthcare, customer service, and technical expertise. If Emmy-winning storytellers who are supposed to be masters of craft are really trying to honor medical personnel as their marketing seems to preach, can they at the very least do their research for the language they decide to use on global streaming to soothe the world?

It’s infuriating to discover after a quick search that even when the actors on set do the labor of bringing authenticity to the table—Isa Briones consulting her father for a Visayan song; Amielynn Abellera consulting the Fil-Am Muslim community for Nurse Perlah—Hollywood still defaults to flattening an entire archipelago to meet an air date.

Vogue and the Manila Bulletin recognize the lullaby as Hiligaynon. Filipinos on social media recognize it. But a nine-figure production that prides itself on “ER realism”? They label it Tagalog, favoring something that comes off lazy but marketable because it’s what—easier? More efficient? Because educating their primary viewers is too hard? Bullshit. 

I’m already anticipating the PR spin that might claim a technical error to cover up what honestly reeks of a refusal to see us as real people.

When a living, breathing language is misnamed, the people who speak it daily are erased. It’s no different from the countless stories I’ve heard over the years of friends enduring taunts, or who have had to shield their parents when some ignorant individual heckles: Speak English.

I refuse to be told that I am “just upset” about a string of subtitles. I am appalled that a production house with an episodic budget in millions didn’t bother to have someone QA their subs while they profit from Filipino stories.

Leave the writers or the actors who are just there to do their jobs out of this—I am volleying this critique directly at a streaming giant that prides itself on prestige while operating on cultural shortcuts. Asian culture is not a decoration or set dressing for you to use to make your stories interesting. It is a historical, geographical and verifiable fact that you can afford to research with more diligence.

This isn’t about asking for representation for my country—the Eraserheads proved that we were world class when “Ang Huling El Bimbo” won the goddamned moon man on global television in 1997. This is about accuracy and respect.

If you can afford to get the medicine right, you can damn well afford to get the people right.