What Does the “X” in Filipinx Mean for Buwan ng Wika?
A case for The Tortured Linguists Department: this Buwan ng Wika, somewhere in the search for the unknown ‘X’ in translation, artificial intelligence becomes both a crucible and a bridge—revealing who gets to digitize, preserve, and define the Filipino experience.
Words Bernadette Soriano
Art by Tristan Talon
August 12, 2026
Art by Tristan Talon
Hardly a harmless typographical quirk, the letter “X”—slotted into imported labels like Filipinx and swept into the digital melting pot on which chatbot prompts are trained—has provoked a subtle turf war between fleeting internet trends and deep-seated heritage, laying bare a sharper question: in an algorithm-driven world, who actually holds the pen?
In an Art+ Magazine exclusive interview, Bryan Elijah Trajano, a master’s degree holder in Filipino Studies from De La Salle University (DLSU) and a member of the Society of Filipino Film Reviewers, helps pry open the hood on this cultural friction, bringing a scholar’s eye to the convictions driving this contest of wills.
Anchored in this month’s theme, Wikang Filipino at AI: Kasangkapan sa Pananaliksik at Tulay sa Yaman ng Impormasyon, Trajano’s take exposes a far higher-stakes crossroad: predictive code will either steamroll local nuance into digital monotony or unseal a long-buried vault of Filipino lore.
Exported then imported
To grasp why imported phrasing rings a bell, one must trace its steps to transpacific roots, at which the diasporic quest for non-binary belonging got hopelessly entangled in American identity politics.
Art by Tristan Talon
Trajano grounds the trend right where it started: “For me, Filipinx kasi, is more kasi sa Filipino diaspora. Technically sa, usually sa US nangyayari 'yan,” he observes. “Kasi before Filipinx... nag-start kasi siya sa Latinx, which is 'yung mga Latino, Latina culture.”
While gender-neutral tweaks hold water in heavily gendered Romance tongues like Spanish, they hit a curious dead end when grafted onto Philippine grammar, whose ancient, built-in fluidity renders such imported patches redundant from the start.
Trajano zeroes in on this disconnect: “Gets naman siguro do’n sa point nila na they need Filipinx, kasi they think Filipino is a gendered language, but it's not.”
He points back to the native baseline: “For me, I agree that it is a gender-neutral [language]... Kasi Filipino can be really, p’wedeng-p’wede to identify a girl, a boy, or a non-binary person. In our language, we are already gender-neutral, per se.”
No amount of diligence devoted to processing the vast body of our words equips the algorithm with the discernment to read between the cultural lines, having been schooled on a largely Western canon that conditions it to diagnose a defect where none exists, entirely oblivious to how Filipinos had solved the very structural riddle the code now purports to fix.
The empire strikes back—digitally
Bound as it is to historical memory, scarcely can this linguistic friction be understood apart from the longue durée of Filipino identity itself.
Art by Tristan Talon
Nick Joaquin, in Culture and History, famously conceived not a museum piece trapped in amber, while in truth an adaptive, ever-evolving formation gained ground through successive colonial shocks and shared Filipino experience.
Today, that same reshaping is taking place inside code and digital archives.
The dynamic, however, shifts once Western-centric terminology returns to the homeland under the guise of “progressiveness” where what might otherwise have remained an organic process of coming together takes to playing by borrowed rulebooks apace.
Pressed on critics who dismiss “Filipinx” as an imported put-on or a fleeting stopgap, Trajano parries with steely grace—drawing a firm line where honoring the diaspora’s searching ends and submitting to cultural overreach begins: “I have to acknowledge their experiences. Especially Filipinx kasi it's a diasporic experience,” he stresses, refusing to diminish the lived realities of Filipinos abroad.
“Pero sa akin lang kasi, yes, okay naman ako ng Filipinx, pero iba kasi 'yung case pag in-impose na mismo dito sa locals because it's abhorrent to us.”
Striking indeed is the paradox: in striving to “decolonize” a language whose native grammar never harbored a gender binary, do we not simply swap one imperial stencil for another?
It is a tension that forcefully calls to mind Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s warning in Can the Subaltern Speak?—that dominant institutions reveal their hubris less in open conquest than in the arrogance of renaming a world without first understanding the worlds from which those names come from.
The moment global AI translates, summarizes, or interprets local languages without grounding itself in the cultures, histories, and worldviews that birthed them, what it forfeits isn't just a few minor details, but the very context that anchors their weight—stripping a living tradition down into something effortless to process, yet completely detached from its heritage past.
Lost in preservation
If Trajano's analysis accomplishes anything, it is to expose the skewed priorities of our language debates.
Art by Tristan Talon
While so much energy is spent arguing over an imported suffix and the politics attached to it, a far graver loss unfolds almost unnoticed: the slow disappearance of the archipelago's indigenous languages.
Whatever quarrels may persist over naming, they pale beside the starker truth: what truly imperils these languages' survival is that they have been left to wither, overlooked by institutions and steadily drowned out by English's long-standing grip.
“Aside from Filipinx, we need to focus as well on the issues on how we can intellectualize and preserve different Filipino languages, especially with the endangered ones to prevent from its extinction,” Trajano asserts, re-anchoring the spotlight on the domestic front.
Long privileged as the language hoarding the keys to social mobility, English has left regional tongues waging a grim rear-guard battle—a plight made all the more arresting as AI arrives to re-architect the ledger of human memory.
“Ang sad n'yan kasi may mga Filipino languages na namamatay na lang kasi konti na lang 'yung nagsasalita or kulang sa means to research to keep the language alive," Trajano laments.
X-pectationsvs. reality
Rather than nursing a bitter divide that grows more performative by the day, Trajano advocates for a little empathy between the diaspora, local communities, and the tech now learning to speak in our stead.
Art by Tristan Talon
“They need to find the common ground para kahit paano ma-understand... 'Okay, naintindihan ko kung bakit Filipinx doon,' pero intindihin din kung bakit Filipino ang nararapat dito sa bansa natin,” he concludes.
As the country marks its language-month stretch, the debate ultimately asks less which word is correct than whose histories, geographies, and lived realities our language is expansive enough to hold. Identity cannot be decreed by foreign trends or enforced by online fiat.
Not until the diaspora and the homeland—and the technologies mediating our words—learn to meet one another with equal measures of humility, historical imagination, and respect for local context will it become apparent that the divide between Filipino and Filipinx is of an altogether different order than any single letter could ever account for.
And should AI claim a noble calling this Buwan ng Wika, it lies less in churning out ready-made answers than in serving as a true kasangkapan sa pananaliksik, drawing sidelined truths back into the light—and a genuine tulay sa yaman ng impormasyon bridging us to a history that demands not dramatic rediscovery so much an overdue regard it has too often been denied.
