The state of the art of the documentation of Philippine languages
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2009-03-14
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The Philippines is a land with great linguistic diversity. According to the latest edition of Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), there are 175 languages spoken in the Philippines. Of these, 168 are Austronesian. In the past few decades, a number of articles summarizing the state of the art of Philippine linguistics have appeared, including Constantino 1971; McKaughan 1971; Reid 1981; Quakenbush 2003, 2005; Author 2006. However, none of these papers focus on the documentation of the languages of the Philippines. This paper fills in the gap by focusing the discussion on the state of the art of the documentation of Philippine languages. The term “Philippine languages” refers to indigenous languages of the Philippines. Thus, those languages that are not found in the geographical confines of the Philippines that have been proposed to be part of a subgroup of Philippine languages, such as Yami and the Sangiric, Minahasan, and Gorontalic languages of northern Sulawesi (Blust 1991), are excluded from the present study. Moreover, languages that are spoken inside the Philippines but are not considered to be indigenous to it, such as English, Spanish, and Chinese languages, are also excluded. This paper surveys works on Philippine languages with an attempt to address the following two questions. First, what types of work (e.g. dictionaries, grammars, texts, etc.) have been done on the documentation of Philippine languages? Second, are these works mainly done by Filipinos or non-Filipinos? Statements made in this paper are based on information gathered from the following sources: (i) Bibliography of the Summer Institute of Linguistics Philippines 1953-2003 (Johnson et al. 2003)—for SIL academic publications, (ii) annual reports of Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino; (iii) lists of publications directly solicited from scholars, (iv) abstracts of theses and dissertations, Department of Linguistics, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines at Diliman, and (v) web search. It is hoped that this study not only offers an overview of the documentation of Philippine languages, but also can inspire more linguists and/or local communities to get involve in the documentation of Philippine languages. Moreover, it is hoped that this study can also inspire and/or encourage more Filipinos to work on documenting Philippine languages. [Word count: 359 words] References Author. 2006. Philippine linguistics: The state of the art 1981-2005. Paper delivered as the Annual Lecture for “The Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, Distinguished Professorial Chair in Linguistics and Language Education”, March 4, 2006, at De La Salle University in Manila. Blust, Robert A. 1991. The Greater Central Philippines hypothesis. Oceanic Linguistics 30:73-129. Constantino, Ernesto. 1971. Tagalog and other major languages of the Philippines. In Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 8: Linguistics in Oceania, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 112-154. The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 15th edition. (http://www.ethnologue.com/) Johnson, Rex A., Grace O. Tan, and Cynthia Goshert, compilers. 2003. Bibliography of the Summer Institute of Linguistics Philippines 1953-2003 (50th Anniversary Edition). Manila: Summer Institute of Linguistics Philippines. [Bibliography alphabetically listed by language names] McKaughan, Howard P. 1971. Minor languages of the Philippines. Current Trends in Linguistics, Volume 8: Linguistics in Oceania, Part One, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 155-167. The Hague: Mouton. Quakenbush, J. Stephen. 2003. Philippine linguistics from an SIL perspective: Trends and prospects. Philippine Journal of Linguistics 34(1):1-27. Quakenbush, J. Stephen. 2005. Philippine linguistics from an SIL perspective: Trends and prospects. In Current issues in Philippine linguistics and anthropology: Parangal kay Lawrence A. Reid, ed. by Hsiu-chuan Liao and Carl R. Galvez Rubino, 3-27. Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines and SIL Philippines. Reid, Lawrence A. 1981. Philippine linguistics: The state of the art: 1970-1980. In Philippine studies: Political science, economics, and linguistics, ed. by Don V. Hart, 212-273. DeKalb: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University.
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