THE State of the Nation Address (SONA) is an annual report to Filipinos delivered by the President of the Republic of the Philippines before a joint session of Congress. Philippine presidents have given reports to the nation since the early days of the nation-state, yet the SONA in its current form began in 1936 under the presidency of Manuel Quezon. The report is not only a plain statement of accomplishments and plans. British philosopher of language J.L. Austin, in his well-received speech act theory, postulated that we do things with words and that every word we utter is not only speech but an act performed. Going by this, it is not difficult to see how the SONA performs so many acts; not only is it informative, but it is, more than anything, ideological and persuasive. Presidents in their SONAs are indirectly telling their constituents that they are doing their job well as heads of State. The SONAs are therefore of great national importance, politically, historically and socially. As such, for a linguist, they are certainly interesting texts to analyze, theorize on or test theories on. I am quite familiar with the research done and papers written on SONAs, looking at many of their linguistic aspects. I shall leave the task of doing a much finer-grained analysis to interested students of linguistics, but do allow me to make a few remarks and some linguistic analysis on the SONA of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivered on July 24, 2023. I am particularly interested in how language was used and what points relate to language in the most recent SONA.

Broadly speaking, the address last Monday was in English, but some sizable portions were in Filipino, the national language. President Marcos used Filipino when he was talking about agricultural issues and reforms, when transitioning to new points in his speech and providing an overview of these new points, and also perhaps when trying to touch the sentimental Filipino, a strategy also employed by many Philippine presidents and evidenced in this line in the last SONA: 'Sa ating pagtahak sa kaunlaran, walang mamamayang Pilipino ang maiiwanan.'