FAR EASTERN UNIVERSITY

Nicanor Reyes St. Sampaloc, Manila

S.Y 2019-2020
INSTITUTE OF NURSING
WIKA, KULTURA, AT LIPUNAN

Ilocano: A Native Language from the Northern Philippines

1. Characteristics and Traits

● Family Life
- Ilocano families usually have an average size of family members and are usually range
from six to seven persons. Usually, the father is the formal head of the family and decides
for every decision to be done while the mother is in-charged of disciplinary situations and
manages the house and finances.

● Clothing
- Inappropriate dress based on wealth and age has been one focus of gossips in their place.
Particularly said as mabiag ti ruar ngem matay ti uneg (outwardly alive, but inwardly dying);
uray napintas no inutang (even if it is nice, it is acquired through credit). However, during
occasions, one must dress accordingly.

● Education
- Ilocanos are almost literate which can read and write accordingly.

● Cultural Heritage
- Biag ni Lamang (Life of Lam-ang) is an Ilocano epic which is Hispanicized metrical
romance composed in 19th century.

- Ilocano culture revolves around life rituals, festivities, and oral history. These were
celebrated in songs (kankanta), dances (salsala), poems (dandaniw), riddles (burburtia),
proverbs (pagsasao)

● Crafts and Hobbies

- Ilocano like other Filipinos engaged in the same hobbies such as weaving, wood carving
and playing chess.

2. Developments
- Ilocos has the fourth lowest poverty incidence among 17 regions and registered the third-
fastest reduction since 2006 after Mimaropa and Caraga both with high starting poverty
rates of over 40 percent. In renewable energy, Ilocos Norte has already windmill farms in
Burgos by Energy Development Corp. and Pagudpud (North Luzon Renewable Energy)
aside from Bangui (Northwind Power).

● Agriculture
- Among the most productive in the nation. In 2015, palay and corn yields are higher than
the national average.
- The same is true for tobacco, carabao mango, eggplant, and tomato. Bangus fish cages
and ponds in Pangasinan supply Manila.

● Infrastructure
- Bangui Wind Farm
The location of the Philippines being near the Asia-Pacific monsoon belt is ideal for
installing wind turbines. The Northwind Bangui Bay Project is located at the
municipality of Bangui, Ilocos Norte, Philippines. Located at the north-west tip of Luzon
island, the wind turbines face the sea from where the wind blows towards the land. Its
location along the shore is optimal in removing windbreaks and has a terrain
roughness of 0.
- Solar power plants
Ilocos Norte has two other existing solar plants, one is a 7.9MW solar farm established by
Energy Development Corporation (EDC) situated in Burgos town while the other is a 20 MW
solar power plant project of Soleq Philippines Inc. located in Currimao town.

3. Language
Ilocano (also spelled as Ilokano, and also known as Iloko or Iloku) is the chief regional
language of Northern Luzon. It is a member of the Austronesian language family under
the Philippine branch of Malayo-Polynesian languages. Ilocano is the language group of
the provinces in the Ilocos region namely, Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, and Abra;
Cagayan Valley; Babuyan; Mindoro; and Mindanao. But, it is also widely spoken in
different provinces such as Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, Tarlac, and Benguet. This is why it
is often referred to as the “National Language of the North.” There are also significant
numbers of communities in the USA specifically in Hawai’i and California.

Ranking third as the most-spoken native language of the Philippines, after Cebuano and
Tagalog, it is used by at least 15 million native speakers. Additionally, some areas in Luzon
uses this language as a lingua franca in trade, commerce, and everyday communication.
Yet, Ilocano only remains as a regional language with no official status.

Dialect
- The provinces of Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur, the original areas of Ilocano native speakers,
are recognized to be speaking the ‘purest’ form of the language with the Ilocanos referring
 it to as ‘nauneg nga Iloko' (deep Ilocano). However, Ilocano has two main dialects:
Northern and Southern. Primarily, their differences lie in the phonology of the language.

Sound
- Despite the size and diversity of the Malayo-Polynesian language family, Ilocano shares
commonalities in its sound system such as having a moderately simple sound system. All
syllables begin with at least one consonant and typically end in a vowel. There are also
consonant clusters mostly at the beginning of the syllables. Only clusters at the end of the
syllables are seen in loanwords.

● Vowels
Northern Ilocano has five vowel phenomes while Southern Ilocano has a sixth vowel /ɯ/.

Front Central Back

Unrounded Rounded
Close i ɯ u
Mid ε o
Open a
➔ /ε/ = e in bed
➔ /ɯ/ has no equivalent in English; it is pronounced like /u/ but without lip rounding.

● Consonants
Ilocano has twenty consonant phonemes. All consonants may be geminated except /f/
and /h/. Some consonants, such as /f/, appear only in loanwords.

Bilabial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal

Stops voiceless p t k ʔ
voiced b d g
Fricatives s h
Affricates
Nasals m n ŋ
Laterals l
Tap or trill r
Approximants w j
➔ /ʔ/ = sound between the vowels in oh-oh
➔ /ŋ/ = ng in song
➔ /j/ = y in yet
Grammar
Ilocano grammar is moderately common with the other Malayo-Polynesian languages such as
Tagalog and Cebuano. Grammatical relations are expressed by prefixation, infixation, suffixation,
circumfixation, encliticization, and reduplication. There are a number of prefixes and infixes, but
only two suffixes.

● Nouns
Ilocano is a type of Ergative-Absolutive language which means that the subject of intransitive
verbs and direct objects of transitive verbs are both marked with the absolutive case. Nouns are
divided into personal and common. Personal nouns take the personal article ‘ni’, and common
nouns take the article ‘ti’. Additionally, plural can be conveyed in two forms: (1) by the plural form
of the article, for example, ti baláy ‘the house’ and dagití baláy ‘the houses’; (2) by various types
of reduplication, for example, ima ‘hand’, and imima ‘hands’. Lastly, nouns borrowed from Spanish
are the only ones marked for gender, for example, doktór (masculine) and doktóra (feminine).

● Pronouns
Personal pronouns are marked for person (1st, 2nd, 3rd), number (singular, plural), and respect
(example: siká informal ‘you’, sikayó formal ‘you’). There is an inclusive and an exclusive 1st
person plural. The inclusive form includes the addressee, while the exclusive form does not. There
is also no gender distinction in the 3rd person singular. Lastly, there are three demonstrative
pronouns: proximal, medial, and distal. Equivalent to English this, that, and yonder.

● Verbs
Ilocano verbs are morphologically complex and use different affixes to mark focus, tense, aspect,
and mood. These affixes consist of prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Reduplication is
also quite common. Also, the majority of all verbs are formed by adding a verbalizing affix to a
root. Moreover, Ilocano verb classes as ‘focus types’ meaning that the role of the noun is reflected
in the verb. There are several foci, such as actor (intransitive) and goal (transitive).

Vocabulary
The lexicon of Ilocano originated from Austrenesian but the language also has loanwords from
Spanish and English. This is a result of the 300 years of Spaniard colonization and half a century
dominance of Americans. It also has additional loanwords from Min Nan Chinese, Malay, Sanskrit,
Arabic, Tamil, Persian, and other Austronesian languages.

Writing
-The Ilokano people had their own distinct indigenous writing system and script known as kur-
itan.
 The Ilokano Kur-itan, 1620

Baybayin was the syllabary writing system of Iloko up until the 17th century but it was
gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet influenced by the Spaniards after they have arrived in
the Philippines in the 16th century. Baybayin was also used in Tagalog writing. The Ilocano
version, however, was the first to designate coda consonants with a diacritic mark – a cross or
virama – shown in the Doctrina Cristiana of 1621, one of the earliest surviving Ilokano
publications.
Doctrina Cristiana of 1621 translated in Ilocano was one of the earlist publications in Iloko

In the present times, Ilocano is written in a 28-letter Latin alphabet that consists of 5 vowels and
15 consonants.

Aa Bb Kk Dd Ee Gg Hh Ii Ll Mm
Nn Ng ng Oo Pp Rr Ss Tt Uu Ww Yy

References:

Dy, R.T. (2016, April 18). Ilocos region, its future. Retrieved from
https://business.inquirer.net/209546/ilocos-region-its-future

Dy, R. T. (n.d.). Ilocos Region, its future. Retrieved from

https://business.inquirer.net/209546/ilocos-region-its-future.

MustGo. (n.d.). Ilocano. Retrieved from https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/ilokano/

Rubino, C. (2005). Ilocano. Retrieved from http://iloko.tripod.com/Ilocano.html

Ominiglot. (2010). Iloko (Iloco). Writing Systems. Retrieved from

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/ilocano.htm

University of Hawaii at Manoa. (n.d.) Ilokano Language and Literature Program. Retrieved from
http://manoa.hawaii.edu/ilokano/mission.html

Ethnologue. (n.d.). Ilocano. A language of the Philippines. Retrieved from

https://www.ethnologue.com/language/ilo