“Karampátan ñg Tao”: Tracing the Rise of Tagalog Human Rights Discourse Using a Textual Corpus

Abstract

This essay is a preliminary study on the rise of human rights discourse in the Tagalog language from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth using a carefully designed textual corpus. The corpus is made up of original Tagalog texts as well as translations of political treatises from European languages into Tagalog. While it has been found that karapatan (rights) is indeed a central notion in the development of a specifically Tagalog revolutionary discourse, the matter of its “inherence” in the tao (human being) has followed a particularly convoluted path due to the existence of alternative interpretations revolving around the moral “worthiness” of individuals and classes.