DEFY THE LANGUAGE BARRIER - A Breaching Experiment by Tear Here

The experimenter, shortly after ordering her food

The goal of the experiment is to defy the norms of society through breaching the language the fast food restaurant was built around in.

The restaurant, McDonalds Katipunan is located in Quezon City which is populated unanimously by people that speak Tagalog as its staple dialect and language. However the experimenters defied this by having one of them speak in Bisaya, a dialect found vastly at the central and southern Philippines, specifically Ilonggo to order food. 

The design of the experiment was really simple; (1) Have the Ilonggo-speaking experimenter lineup casually as if she's an ordinary customer, (2) order what she wants in Ilonggo, and having (3) the rest of the experimenters observing at a distance, observing the different reactions of the test subjects which is in this case, the cashier and the customers around the experimenter. Also, at the end of the experiment, we also asked the experimenter herself for a first hand view of what she saw and observed during the experiment.

The experiment started, the script was set, and the experimenter lined up. After a while, it was finally her turn to order and us observers:

1. Observed no clear sign of anyone finding the experimenter weird at hindsight.

2. Observed that the cashier looked at her for a while and continued her duty

and

3. The people around her seemed to be bothered more than the cashier, which was supposed to be our main test subject.

After ordering, we then asked the experimenter for her first-hand view and analysis of how the test subjects really reacted.

She stated that:

1. After ordering in Ilonggo, the cashier stared at her for a brief amount of time and proceeded to do her duties.

2. The customer beside her seemed more annoyed and more uneasy than the cashier.

Before the experiment was done however, there was already hesitation coming out of the experimenters. Two of them are from the province, and to them, speaking in their dialects in this area seemed weird and it just doesn't belong. From that idea alone, we can say that the language barrier already caused such segregation to where provincial dialects should be kept and where the national language should be used.

After the experiment, all five experimenters concluded that people feel uneasy towards those that defy the language barrier. This may associate with how the vast majority of "kasambahays" the well-to-do and the rich have come from the provinces that speak such language (Bisaya) and with this prejudice, they feel that people that speak the dialect are lower than them in society. This experiment however was designed to be fair since the experimenter was speaking in a language that most people in the country believe to be for low-class citizens of the province, and they are ordering the same kind of food these "Well-to-do" people have, and this thought may cause them uneasiness into realizing that the people they look down to are actually eating the same things they eat. In this case, the restaurant played as a gap closer, a gap closer to the financial barrier that is often prejudiced with language.

Experiment made by Tear Here, (Arbis, Castro, Guanzon, Leocadio, Mendoza)
Photo by David Mendoza