For a century, Filipinos have been migrating overseas in pursuit of economic opportunity. Today there are close to eight million outside the Philippines - a virtual nation, scattered across the face of the Earth in one of the great diasporas, moving not as a wave of refugees fleeing persecution so much as a constant stream of wanderers seeking chances largely denied them at home.

One of the acknowledged strengths of this labor force has always been its proficiency in the English language. But this relative advantage is slipping away from us at a time when we need it most.

The Filipinos learned to speak English under American colonial rule between 1898 and 1946. Since then, English has been taught in schools and is one of the two principal languages of the Philippines. It is the language of official transactions, higher education and the print media. The Philippines has maintained close ties with the United States, which is home to more than a million Filipino immigrants. Thanks to American movies and popular music, urban Filipinos are attuned to American culture, fashion and mores in a way that smacks of slavish imitation. And yes, we know which contestants have qualified for American Idol.

In recent years, some of our English-speaking, American pop-culture-savvy manpower has been persuaded to stay at home and work as agents for outsourced call centers that demand a high degree of English proficiency.

Their clients are mainly American multinational corporations engaged in manufacturing, information technology and financial services. These agents, most of them recent college graduates, take telephone calls from English-speaking people all over the world, and address inquiries and complaints about their clients' products. Instead of having to go to America, these call center operators only have to sound as if they are in America.

Being on the other side of the planet, this involves weird hours - they follow American time zones for the working day of 9pm to 5am - but the pay is better than most other entry-level jobs, and the workspaces are usually comfortable. There's also a certain glamor attached to the job, which essentially requires talking to foreigners. Not long ago, The Wall Street Journal noted that ``the Philippines' growing share of the multibillion-dollar call center market is creating a subculture of Filipinos with American accents, tastes and time zones.'' The bit about time zones is correct, but young urban Filipinos affected American accents and tastes long before the call center boom.

Call centers have become one of the major income earners in the Philippines. The National Statistics Coordination Board reports that the growth of the Philippine economy in 2004 was propelled by the expansion of business process outsourcing (BPO) and call centers. In the last quarter of 2004 there were an estimated 73 call centers in the country employing about 45,000 agents. By the end of 2005, the government expects there will be 140 call centers employing 60,000 agents. The information technology services sector, which covers BPO and call centers, is expected to post 7.1 per cent growth in 2004.

Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Romulo Neri said last month the unexpected development of call centers could push 2004 GDP above 6.2 per cent, and that the business will continue to be a major driver of the economy.

Outsourced call centers in the Philippines receive good ratings in international surveys. India is still the world's leading provider of outsourced call center services, but much has been written about the advantages of opening instead in the Philippines. Our culture is more ``North America-centric,'' and the Filipino accent is easier for American callers to understand. Our deregulated telecommunications industry provides cheap fiber optics services, and special economic zones and ``IT parks'' offer tax breaks and incentives to call centers. Labor costs are one-fifth of US rates.

According to the Contact Center Association of the Philippines - a trade group of outsourcing firms that includes eTelecare, the Los Angeles-based PeopleSupport and Florida-based Sykes Enterprises - the Philippines has a skilled labor pool of 29 million. About 325,000 college graduates are added to that pool every year, 70,000 of them with IT-related training. These graduates all speak English. Or are supposed to.

The call center industry hires about 3,000 agents a month, but only two to five of every 100 applicants are hired.

Why the low hiring rate? Lack of English proficiency is cited as the main reason. Some call center companies are already accepting college undergraduates because they have quotas to fill. Other companies choose ``near hires'' and give them a few weeks of English-language training.

For many years, academic studies have pointed to a decline in the English- language skills of Filipinos. A recent survey commissioned by the Makati Business Club, the Information Technology Association of the Philippines and the American Chamber of Commerce, showed a declining aptitude in English among college graduates and working professionals. Fearing the loss of a lucrative economic opportunity, government and business leaders have been stirred into action. Call centers have tied up with colleges to offer elective courses in English proficiency.

In 2003, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo directed the Department of Education to return English as the primary medium of instruction in schools. In doing so she reversed a policy she set in 2001 which ordered the Education Department to follow the previously established education policy of using Pilipino - the official national language - as the language of instruction. This sparked a new chapter in the long debate on a Philippine national language.

Pilipino was originally proposed as a fusion of the 10 major languages and many smaller languages used across the archipelago, something akin to the way that Bahasa Indonesia has united that country because it is not based on Javanese, the language of the dominant ethnic group. Unfortunately, the Pilipino that is actually spoken today is basically Tagalog, the language spoken in Manila and its environs, with infusions of English and Spanish. Those tens of millions of Filipinos who speak Visayan, Ilocano or a host of other dialects at home are often alienated from the ``national'' language.

Nationalists have traditionally pointed to the negative impact of English, the colonizer's language, on Philippine society. The use of English alienated Filipinos from their own cultural and linguistic heritage, they said. It is interesting to note that the Philippines was under Spanish colonial rule for 350 years, and in all that time only a tiny percentage of the population was ever fluent in Spanish. Today almost no one speaks Spanish, save for a tiny minority of the traditional elite. Few of us could read the original work of our national hero, Jose Rizal, since he wrote in Spanish.

In 1974, the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos adopted a nationalist posture and ordered the adoption of the Bilingual (English and Pilipino) Education Program. This program has been in use since, with Pilipino as the designated medium of instruction in social studies, and English as the medium of instruction in all other areas, particularly science and mathematics.

The Department of Pilipino at the University of the Philippines issued a statement questioning the Arroyo policy. ``Instead of sustaining the forward development of Pilipino as a tool for education, she bends the constitutional imperative to highlight the role of the English language for her `global competitiveness' program,'' the educators said.

``[The Constitution] already paves the status of Pilipino as the only official language of the Philippines; it is the abolition of English that needs enactment from Congress at a time when the Pilipino language has achieved the total recognition and function as the national language.''

The educators also insisted that as Pilipino was the primary medium of instruction only in social studies and native-language classes, and that all other subjects were taught in English, there was no need to ``return'' it. They want Pilipino as the sole medium of instruction in the primary levels, citing research that children learn faster in their native tongue, and that they easily learn a second language if they are already literate in the native language. English could be introduced at the intermediate level, they said.

But English proficiency is dropping at such a rate that students are not learning the language properly - and it is doubtful that students are really being taught in English anyway.

In the recent national achievement tests, public high school seniors scored a 50 per cent average in English - well below the pass mark of 75 per cent.

Why did they do so badly? Here's a significant clue: In an English proficiency exam administered to public high school teachers, only 19 per cent achieved pass scores. If the Philippines is to maintain its competitive advantage in the outsourced call center industry, it has to pay more attention to its teachers.

The government and the private sector agree that teachers are a vital and seriously underpaid resource. Now they must do something about it. Investing in training and retraining of teachers is a start. More importantly, teachers must be paid well enough that they don't leave their homeland to become domestic helpers abroad. The teachers must stay in the Philippines instead of taking their chances in the great Filipino virtual nation outside these shores.

The great national language debate will be resolved in its own time, not by the needs of foreign multinational call centers but by an educated, well-employed workforce taught by good teachers. That is something worth hoping for.