Kapampangan Lexical Borrowing from Tagalog: Endangerment rather than Enrichment Michael Raymon M. Pangilinan
[email protected] Abstract It has sometimes been argued that the Kapampangan language will not be endangered by lexical borrowings from other languages and that lexical borrowings help enrich a language rather than endanger it. This paper aims to prove otherwise. Rather than being enriched, the socio-politically dominant Tagalog language has been replacing many indigenous words in the Kapampangan language in everyday communication. A number of everyday words that have been in use 20 years ago ~ bígâ (clouds), sangkan (reason), bungsul (to faint) and talágâ (artesian well) just to name a few ~ have all been replaced by Tagalog loan words and are no longer understood by most young people. This paper would present a list of all the words that have been replaced by Tagalog, and push the issue that lexical borrowing from a dominant language leads to endangerment rather than enrichment. I. Introduction At first glance, the Kapampangan language does not seem to be endangered. It is one of the eight major languages of the Philippines with approximately 2 million speakers (National Census and Statistics Office, 2003). It is spoken by the majority in the province of Pampanga, the southern half of the province of Tarlac, the northeast quarter of the province of Bataan, and the bordering communities of the provinces of Bulacan and Nueva Ecija (Fig. 1). It has an established literature, with its grammar being studied as early as 1580 by the Spanish colonisers (Manlapaz, 1981). It has also recently penetrated the electronic media: the first ever province-wide news in the Kapampangan language was televised in 2007 by the Pampanga branch of the Manila-based ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation.