Before you read this poem, there is something important to know: historians now widely doubt that Rizal wrote it.
The poem has been taught in Philippine schools for generations as Rizal’s first work — written at age eight, in Tagalog, in 1869. That story is almost certainly not true. The evidence against it is specific, documented, and worth understanding before engaging with the poem itself.
The Attribution Problem
The poem first appeared in 1906 — a decade after Rizal’s death — in a book by the poet Hermenegildo Cruz. Cruz claimed he received it from another poet, Gabriel Beato Francisco, who said he had received it in 1884 from a close friend of Rizal’s named Saturnino Raselis. Rizal, in all his letters and diaries, never once mentioned anyone by that name.
The linguistic evidence is more damaging still. The poem uses the Tagalog word kalayaan — meaning liberty or freedom. The earliest Rizal could have encountered that word was 1882, when he was twenty-one, through a Tagalog translation of his own essay. He was thirteen years older than the eight-year-old who supposedly wrote this poem. In 1886, writing to his brother Paciano about his difficulty translating Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell into Tagalog, Rizal explicitly described his struggle to find an appropriate Tagalog word for the German Freiheit — freedom — and settled on kalayahan, citing del Pilar’s work as his source.
The poem also references Latin and English — languages the eight-year-old Rizal had not yet studied. He admitted in his own memoir that he had only a little Latin a year after the poem was supposedly written. He did not begin studying English until 1880, more than a decade later.
Finally: the poem uses the letters K and W throughout. In 1869, Tagalog spelling followed Spanish orthography, which used C and U instead. The shift to K and W was proposed by Rizal himself as an adult, and made official in the early twentieth century. An eight-year-old in 1869 would not have written “Kababata” — he would have written “Cabata.”
The poem may have been written by Cruz or Francisco themselves. It may have been written during the American period, when the orthography it uses was in common use. What it almost certainly was not written by is an eight-year-old José Rizal in 1869.
Why It Still Matters
None of this means the poem should be dismissed or ignored. It captures something genuine about how Rizal’s legacy has been understood and taught — the desire to see the seeds of his nationalism present from the very beginning of his life. And its argument, whoever wrote it, is one Rizal did hold: that a people who love their native language preserve something of their liberty within it, and that the loss of that language under colonialism is not a neutral or accidental thing.
The poem is taught in every Philippine school. It is part of the cultural record. Students encounter it, memorize it, and are asked to analyze it. This page exists for that reason — but with the honest acknowledgment that the attribution is disputed, and that the evidence against it is substantial.
The Poem
Kapagka ang baya’y sadyang umiibig
Sa kanyang salitang kaloob ng langit,
Sanlang kalayaan nasa ring masapit
Katulad ng ibong nasa himpapawid.
Pagka’t ang salita’y isang kahatulan
Sa bayan, sa nayo’t mga kaharian,
At ang isang tao’y katulad, kabagay
Ng alin mang likha noong kalayaan.
Ang hindi magmahal sa kanyang salita
Mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda,
Kaya ang marapat pagyamaning kusa
Na tulad sa inang tunay na nagpala.
Ang wikang Tagalog tulad din sa Latin
Sa Ingles, Kastila at salitang anghel,
Sapagka’t ang Poong maalam tumingin
Ang siyang naggawad, nagbigay sa atin.
Ang salita nati’y tulad din sa iba
Na may alfabeto at sariling letra,
Na kaya nawala’y dinatnan ng sigwa
Ang lunday sa lawa noong dakong una.
English Translation
Whenever a people truly loves
The language given to them by heaven,
They also pursue and hold their freedom
Like the bird that soars free above.
For language is the judge and referee
Upon the people in the land where it holds sway;
And everyman resembles in this way
All other living beings born to liberty.
Whoever does not love his native tongue
Is worse than any beast or stinking fish;
To make our language richer ought to be our wish
As a mother nourishes and loves her young.
Tagalog and the Latin tongue are the same
As English, Spanish, and the angels’ speech,
For God, who watches wisely over all,
Made and gave this language unto us.
Our language too, like all the others,
Had its own alphabet and its own script,
Which were lost when a storm brought low in woe
The vessel on the lake in the long ago.
What the Poem Argues
The five stanzas make a single argument: that language is not merely a tool of communication but a marker of freedom and identity. A people who love and preserve their native tongue preserve something of their liberty within it. A people who abandon their language — or have it taken from them — lose something that cannot easily be recovered.
The final stanza is the most historically specific. It refers to the pre-colonial Philippine writing system — Baybayin — and its disappearance under Spanish colonization, described here as a storm that capsized a vessel on a lake. Whether or not Rizal wrote these lines, they articulate something he genuinely believed and argued throughout his adult life: that colonial rule does not only steal land and labor — it steals history, language, and the capacity of a people to name their own experience.
That argument is worth taking seriously, regardless of who first put it into verse.
