Philippine English vocabulary
IN describing Philippine English, I begin with vocabulary and not typically with pronunciation, simply because vocabulary would have to be used in both speech and writing. I shall describe Philippine English pronunciation much later when I have already discussed language structures appearing in both speech and writing. Linguists have a more technical term for “vocabulary,” and that is “lexicon.” There would, indeed, be technical differences between the two, but I shall save you readers from that kind of puzzle since that is not the focus of today’s column.
In this column, I particularly wish to draw attention to some words, or lexical items, which are peculiarly Philippine English. Not that they are exclusively used in Philippine English, but a number of them are more frequent in Philippine English than in other varieties of the language. Some of them have actually been retained in the Philippines while they have been out of fashion in other varieties, most especially American English.
My favorite example of a Philippine English lexical item that is easily comprehensible to Filipinos but not to other speakers of English is “comfort room,” which is even shortened to “CR.” Words that alternate with comfort room in other varieties are “toilet,” “bathroom,” “lavatory” and “washroom.” I have also noticed the prevalence of “water closet” in other countries. The phrase comfort room did not originate from Philippine English, but its use has almost disappeared from American English, so it is one of those terms that is peculiarly Philippine English.
Another word that is used every day — more so nowadays, I suppose — is “traffic.” Simply, it should mean vehicular flow on the road, but in Philippine English, it particularly means heavy traffic, where vehicles are so close to one another that they move very slowly.
Yet another interesting word is “salvage,” which supposedly means to save something from a shipwreck, but the word has a bloodier connotation in Philippine English. In local use, it means to violently kill someone and dumping his or her remains in some isolated place, usually an empty or abandoned space or lot. There is also “carnap” or “carnapper” to refer to stealing motor vehicles or the person committing the crime.
Filipinos are also fond of using “-mate” a little too creatively in situations where other varieties would not usually use it: “batchmate,” “churchmate,” and “textmate.”
I wish to highlight these few interesting items, and I shall discuss more in the next few columns. In particular, the strategies we use to create more words and, more interestingly, how some of them got into the Oxford English Dictionary.
Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is one of the leading scholars on English in the Philippines who is also doing pioneering work on language in the context of migration. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at 23, from De La Salle University. He has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore and Taiwan. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.