John Michael B.

Satur February 15,

2020

Master of English in Applied Linguistics

Indigenous Languages in the Philippines

Prof. Sajed Ingilan

One of the vital components that make up what a society is its language. Language is a

looking glass that reminds us the history of struggles, innovations, and development milestones

of a certain community. It tells that it is more than just a tool for our daily communicative

activities, but a culture that is receptive to change that is influenced by the advents of geographic

and socio-economic demands.

The internal multiplicity and diversity of languages of a country is a rosy picture one can

imagine. The rich ethno-linguistic profile a country assumes a vibrant community is. However,

as much as the notion is promising to process, it is least of the concern for the academic

community that explore the idiosyncrasies and complexities of languages. Despite the imagery of

a society built in linguistic differences, multilingualism poses hypotheses on how languages are

interestingly connected with some of the languages while a number of dialects have still

unknown origin; thus, implies a challenge to delve and investigate more.

In understanding interconnectivity and similarity of languages, one has to employ a

variety of lenses yet the purpose is to bridge the common ground and understand the ancestry of

languages. One of the popular underpinnings used by ethnolinguists today is the concept of

‘mutual intelligibility.’ The concept allows the researcher understand how languages are

connected on the basis on how different speech communities understand each other through

cognitive assumptions; hence, dialects may be descended from the same mother language or
‘cognates.’ Although, this concept shows interesting breakthrough, the lense does necessarily

work to all.

Moreover, the indigenous Philippines languages is known to have been influenced and

descended from Austronesian family of languages. This includes the languages of Pacific

Islanders, Indonesia, Malaysia, among others which shows significant relativity of sharing

phono-syntactic features with the indigenous languages in the Philippines. The Bahasa language

particularly, an Indonesian language, has been found to have shared some of the lexicons with

the local languages in the Philippines. It can be observed on how both languages have linguistic

similarity with the terms used in fundamental numerical system. Thus, patterns in linguistic

similarity contributes to the discussion of historical linguistics, but the linguistic in general.

Furthermore, the phenomenon of migration waves dates back the nomadic exploration of

Negritos, Malayo-Polynesian, and Indonesian prove to have greatly influenced the linguistic

situation in the Philippines; and how these races breed a hybrid of linguistic identities of

Filipinos. It also points out that Philippines is a product of various of both racial and linguistic

influences.

Furthermore, the geographic landscape is one factor why a lot of variations of the

language situation in the Philippines. Those who resided in the seashore have more influences

from traders which pave the way for the linguistic phenomenon called pidgin. As pidgin evolved,

it develops an acceptable linguistic system which now becomes a ‘creole.’

The number of languages in the Philippines only tells us that there is so much culture and

history to study. The evidence of migration influences is among of the factors that proves that

languages in the Philippines are diverse. Additionally, the similarities of lexical, phonological,
and syntactical patterns of the languages in the Philippines and other Austronesian languages

hold relativity.