View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa Tagalog and Philippine Languages Philippine Languages national language, now known as Filipino. Furthermore, it has become the main language of Over 150 languages are spoken by the more than movies and comics, and much of the Philippine mass 76,500,000 Filipinos who live in an archipelago of media. It is required to be taught in all the schools in around 7,000 islands that stretches over 1,500 kilome- the Philippines, and is rapidly becoming the main sec- ters from north to south, and about 800 kilometers ond language that people speak throughout the coun- from the most western point of Palawan to the most try. Sebuano, Ilokano, and Hiligaynon are widely easterly point of Mindanao. Most of the languages are spoken as regional trade languages. Ilokano is the dialectally diverse, with a number constituting exten- main language of trade and wider communication spo- sive dialect chains. ken throughout northern Luzon. It is also spoken in All Philippine languages belong to the Western some areas of southern Mindanao and is the main Malayo-Polynesian group of the Austronesian lan- Philippine language spoken in the United States and guage family. The archeological record suggests that other countries to which Filipinos have migrated. the earliest Austronesian speakers arrived in the north- Sebuano is used not only in the Visayan area of the ern Philippines, probably from what is now called Central Philippines, but also in much of southern Taiwan about 5,500 years ago, at the beginning of the Mindanao. Hiligaynon is also spoken in some parts of migrations that later took them to the Indo-Malaysian southern Mindanao. archipelago, and ultimately into the Pacific. Since the At the other end of the scale, there are scores of lan- time of the first Austronesian habitation of the guages spoken by relatively small groups of peoples. Philippines, the original language has diversified into Many of these languages are spoken in highly isolated a number of fairly clearly defined subgroups (Blust areas, such as the remote, mountainous areas of 1991). Mindanao, Palawan, and Luzon, as well as on small, Of the 167 Philippine ethnolinguistic groups cited isolated islands. Some of the smallest languages, and in Grimes (2000), at least ten are presently spoken by the ones most in danger of dying out in the very near more than a million population, and constitute what future are those spoken by some of the approximately have been referred to as the ‘major’ languages of the 30 surviving Negrito groups, descendants of the origi- Philippines. These are Tagalog, Sebuano, Ilokano, nal non-Austronesian inhabitants of the Philippines, Hiligaynon, Bikol, Samar-Leyte, Kapampangan, whose original languages were ultimately replaced by Pangasinan, Maranao, and Magindanao. The first four those of the culturally more dominant Austronesians. of these languages have considerable importance in These include Arta, the language of fewer than a dozen the Philippines. Tagalog, with some 15,000,000 native remaining members of a group in Quirino Province, speakers, is the native language of Manila and a num- the Atta and Agta groups of Kalinga-Apayao and ber of surrounding provinces. It is also the basis of the Cagayan Provinces, some of the Dumagat and Alta 1 TAGALOG AND PHILIPPINE LANGUAGES groups of Isabela and Quezon Provinces, the Sierra stands for any consonant and V for any vowel. The Madre mountain range, and the islands off the eastern disyllabic Tagalog word bahay ‘house’ is typical of the coast of Luzon, as well as the many Ayta groups of great majority of common nouns in Tagalog and other Bataan and Zambales Provinces. Many of these lan- Philippine languages. Verbs are commonly morpho- guages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. On a logically highly complex, with various prefixes, infix- slightly larger scale are the languages spoken in the es, and suffixes providing both syntactic and semantic Cordillera Central, the massive mountain range in the information. A wide variety of reduplicative processes center of northern Luzon. These include closely relat- is also found. ed varieties of Ifugao, Bontok, Balangaw, Kankanay, and Kalinga, some of which have fewer than 50,000 Tagalog speakers each. Similarly, the number of speakers of several of the Manobo languages of Mindanao is esti- Tagalog is a nonconfigurational language (Kroeger mated to be no more than 10,000 to 15,000. 1993). Its basic sentences are predicate initial, with Prior to European settlement in the Philippines nominal complements typically following the predi- beginning with the Spanish in 1521, Philippine lan- cate. Noun phrase word order is not rigid, except that guages had already been strongly influenced by con- actors typically precede other actants, and full NPs tact with traders from outside the country. The Chinese which carry nominative case tend to occur later in the (primarily speakers of Hokkien) had established sentence. Since there is no copula verb, Tagalog sen- enclaves in major port areas (beginning around the tences may have a noun, an adjectival form, or a twelfth century CE). Similarly, traders speaking a vari- prepositional phrase as the predicate of a sentence: e.g. ety of Malay probably used in Brunei, Malaysia had Doktor ang bisita. ‘The visitor is a doctor.’ Maganda firmly established themselves in the Manila area at ang babae. ‘The woman is beautiful.’ Nasa kusina ang least 100 years prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Their regalo. ‘The gift is in the kitchen.’ NPs are typically influence on Tagalog was considerable. But it was the introduced by one of a small number of short, Spanish occupation of the Philippines for over 400 unstressed words, often referred to as determiners, that years that had the most impact on the languages of the provide information about the case, plurality, and per- country. Probably every Philippine language has a sonhood of the following noun, as in Table 1. Most large number of words that are ultimately of Spanish common nouns are not inflected for plurality, but may origin. There is at least one language in the Philippines have a plural word mga (/ma a/) following the deter- that shows a far greater influence from Spanish than miner to mark plurality: e.g. Tumakbo ang mga batà . does Tagalog. This language, called Chavacano or ‘The children ran.’ Nominative forms typically mark Zamboangueño, is a creole language spoken mainly in an NP as specific or definite. They may also mark top- Zamboanga City and surrounding areas. icalized NPs and definite NPs functioning as predi- The other major influence on Philippine languages cates. has come from English as a result of the 50 years that Tagalog distinguishes three case-marked sets of America colonized the Philippines. English is still personal pronouns, as shown in Table 2. In addition to spoken widely throughout the Philippines, is one of pronouns that refer to the speaker (first person), direct- the languages used in education, and continues to ly address the hearer (second person), or refer to a influence Philippine languages. third person, Tagalog like other Philippine languages Most Philippine languages have sound systems that has distinct forms for first person plural exclusive are relatively simple. Most have between three and six (‘we, not you’), and first person plural inclusive (‘we vowels. Tagalog originally had three distinctive vow- all’). Pronouns with dual reference (‘we, two’), while els, i, a, and u, but two more vowels, e and o,have common in many Philippine languages, are used only developed as a result of influence from Spanish bor- in rural areas where Tagalog is spoken. An irregular rowings. Many languages still retain the same vowel combined form of Genitive 1s and Nominative 2p, system that has been reconstructed for Proto- kita, occurs, e.g. Iniibig kita. ‘I love you.’ Third person Austronesian, with four vowels, i, a, u, and ଙ (Reid pronouns do not distinguish gender. Nominative pro- 1973). Similarly, most Philippine languages have fewer than 18 consonants. They are nontonal, but TABLE 1 Tagalog Determiners some have lexical stress and distinguish vowel length. A number of the languages of northern Luzon, such as Nominative Genitive Oblique Locative Inialoi, exhibit complex morphophonemic variation. Common ang ng /na● / ng /na● / sa Most Philippine languages have only two or three Personal different kinds of syllables. Words are commonly built Singular si ni –– kay Plural sina nina –– kina using just two syllable types, CV and CVC, where C 2 TAGALOG AND PHILIPPINE LANGUAGES nouns also function as predicates: e.g. Ikaw ang anak Pumasok si Nila. ‘Nila entered.’, or dyadic, in which ni Pedro. ‘You are the child of Pedro.’ Genitive forms case an additional NP expressing a theme argument express not only possessors that follow their noun occurs, expressed by the oblique case when indefinite, heads, but also actor participants in a clause: e.g. or a partitive, definite NP, e.g. Bumili sila ng mangga. Ibinigay nila ang libro sa titser nila. ‘They gave the ‘They bought mangoes’; Uminom noon ang mga batà. book to their teacher.’ Pronominal forms, as well as ‘The children drank some of that.’ Such sentences are clitic adverbs such as na ‘already’, pa ‘yet’, and din syntactically intransitive. ‘Nonactor focus’ verbs carry ‘also’, occur as second position clitics attaching to the one of a different set of affixes on the verb that indi- first constituent within the clause, such as a negative cates whether some participant other than the actor auxiliary, e.g. Hindi ko pa rin binili ang libro. ‘I still carries Nominative case. In these sentences, the actor haven’t bought the book yet’, or a fronted adverb, e.g.