The study of dialects in the Philippines

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OCIOLINGUISTICS, the study of the dynamics of language and society, is among the most thriving sub-disciplines of linguistics in the country. In fact, the late Education, Culture and Sports secretary Br. Andrew Gonzalez would often say the Philippines is a very good sociolinguistics laboratory because of the many opportunities it presents for the study of language in relation to society. Dialectology, however, seems not to be something that has greatly interested Filipinos, even if sociolinguistics traces its origins to the study of dialects and variation.

Perhaps, this dearth of studies on dialectology is one of the reasons why most Filipinos do not have a clear understanding of the concept of dialects. Most Filipinos would not be familiar with dialects in the Philippines and, most probably, when asked what the dialects are in the Philippines, they will mention Cebuano, Ilocano, Bicolano and other similar languages.

Dialectology is the systematic study of dialects, of linguistic variation primarily influenced by geography. English has dialects, of course, any language normally would. But I could guess that is something most people would be more familiar with. English English is different from Scottish English, in the same way as English in New York varies from that of California. Regionally-accented English in the Philippines is also emerging, but evidence toward that is not yet strong.

As I discussed in my previous columns, however, there exists Manila Tagalog, Bulacan Tagalog, Batangas Tagalog and other dialects of Tagalog. There is a recent dissertation completed at De La Salle University, that of Dr. Philip Rentillo, at present vice chairman of the university’s Department of English and Applied Linguistics, and his dissertation for his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the same university looked into dialects in Panay.

The study of dialects has its own unique research techniques and methodologies and Dr. Rentillo’s dissertation on dialects in Panay utilized some of those. His dissertation aimed to survey the dialects of the languages within Panay and to investigate the perceptions of native Panayanons on the dialects of their island. The dissertation comprised three studies incorporating contemporary approaches and interesting methodologies, including interviews using a 495-item wordlist, and a perceptual and awareness survey, which has Likert-type questionnaires and a draw-a-map task. The first study focused on computerbased dialectometry, or the measurement of words and sounds through a statistical algorithm built in Cog, a language research software developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Degrees of similarities and differences of local varieties were measured using aggregate data based on 495 words elicited from 262 informants, predominantly youth, across the four provinces of Panay. Statistical data were cross-checked with interviews and anecdotal reports to help determine the presence and approximate geographic location of dialects.

This study was also to provide an update on the 1970 study of Eliza Uy-Griño on Panay albeit was guided by a different approach on data mostly from the elderly.

Languages are carried by people whose movements are, in turn, affected by geography and social realities. Hence, a second study integrated QGIS, a software specialized in geographic information system (GIS), the same satellite-based technology used to develop maps found in desktop and mobile applications today, such as Google Maps and Waze. Spatial data on population density/spread, transportation infrastructure, river systems and land elevation (to identify mountains) were overlaid onto the geographic presence and extent of dialects identified in the first study. This was to determine the geographic and sociopolitical patterns of Panay dialects, and which are barriers to and are facilitators of the spread, development and maintenance of the dialects within the local context.

Apart from what can be considered conventional dialectology in the first two studies, a third study delved into the budding subfield of perceptual dialectology. This involved a two-part dialect perception and awareness survey administered to 363 local Panay youth. The first part contains a questionnaire where respondents had to rate the degree of pleasantness of “speech” from a list of towns and cities, and how similar (or different) these were compared to the speech of their own locality. The second part was a draw-a-map task, where they had to draw lines and/or shapes and write descriptions they could think of anywhere on a blank map based on the dialects they knew within their respective home provinces and the whole of Panay. Accumulated map-drawn data were also used to create a heatmap via QGIS to determine the extent of the respondents’ knowledge of local dialects and which ones are most familiar to them. This was finalized with a short follow-up interview with select respondents on the thought processes that went into their answering the survey.

Dr. Rentillo’s most important finding, perhaps, is being able to identify five dialect zones in Panay: (1) An Akeanon zone containing four dialect areas within Aklan; (2) an Antique Kinaray-a zone with five dialect areas within Antique compared to the more intensely mixed Kinaray-a varieties spoken in Iloilo; (3) a Caluyanon zone within the Caluya Islands; (4) a Central Bisayan-West Bisayan contact zone with the first being a convergence zone involving nine dialect areas mostly in Iloilo where Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a interact; and (5) a Hiligaynon-Capiznon dialect continuum covering ten dialect areas in Iloilo and Capiz. Hiligaynon-Capiznon dialect continuum is rather a dialect continuum because of linguistic evidence pointing to Capiznon — an interesting mix of Kinaray-a words in some areas and of Akeanon in others — as a variety extremely close if not identical to Hiligaynon, which itself is strongly influenced if not shaped by Kinaray-a. There is a wide misconception that Hiligaynon mothered Kinaray-a (and even the other languages of Panay!).

Scholarly evidence, however, argues that it came relatively much later into the island possibly originating somewhere in eastern Visayas. Its earlier form (proto-Hiligaynon) is possibly still closer to the varieties of Waray intermixed with the proto-parent of modern-day Akeanon and Kinaray-a leading to its development into what is today distinctly Hiligaynon. This is why it is classified by linguists to be genetically closer to Waray.

In addition to being a novel work on Philippine dialectology, Dr. Rentillo’s dissertation is one of the few utilizing phonetic data in its linguistic argumentation in the Philippines, as phonetic data is now a staple in contemporary dialectology. There is a methodology that he did not use in his dissertation but interests me in my research on varieties of English around the world. A colleague at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, Prof. Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, introduced corpus-based dialectometry to measure aggregate linguistic distances between dialects using a large database with samples from dialects being studied.

The study of dialects is a fertile area for research, in fact, a very promising line of inquiry Filipino linguistics must pursue. The groundbreaking and pioneering work of Dr. Rentillo should serve as a good example for future Filipino dialectologists, who might be interested to do similar work with other languages and dialects in the country. He is commendable for being courageous enough to do something not previously done before, and I truly believe that is a necessary virtue in advancing not only the study of dialects but linguistics broadly in the Philippines.

Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is one of the leading scholars on English in the Philippines. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics in the country, at age 23 from De La Salle University, and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Malaysia, Poland, Singapore and Taiwan. He is at present associate professor of Sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan.