Iluko: The Language

Abstract

Iluko is a language whose strength and vitality mirrors the character of the millions of people who learned to speak it at their mother’s knee, a people whose character has been strengthened by adversity, a people who in the search for a better life have so often been willing to uproot themselves from their native soil and facing unknown hardships and dangers travel to distant land. This is why even though Iluko only ranks third in the Philippines in terms of number of mother tongue speakers, it is the main language of many areas outside of the Ilokos, such as the relatively newly settled lands in Mindoro and Mindanao and accounts for the language of over 90% of the more than 120,000 Filipinos in the State of Hawai‘i.