The Demise of Proto-Philippines

Abstract

This paper constitutes a report of research in progress. Its results are tentative, in that I am still looking for confirmatory evidence, but the general direction of the research seems justified given the evidence presently available. For a number of years I have operated on the assumption that the Philippine languages (and possibly others, external to the Philippine archipelago) constitute a subfamily within the Malayo-Polynesian, or extra-Formosan languages. Certainly the languages are typologically similar, to the extent that the use of the term 'Philippine-type' is widely accepted as defining a certain kind of verbal syntax. It has been a useful assumption too, in that it has enabled us to reconstruct some features of an early proto-language, to which the label Proto-Philippines has been applied. Clinging to the concept of the Philippines as a subfamily, with each of its languages more closely related to one another than to any language outside the Philippines, has, for me anyway, been a reaction to the completely untenable theory that the different ethnic groups in the Philippines are the result of a series of migrations from the south and the west, a view that was popularised by the late H. Otley Beyer (1948) and which is still taught as fact in Philippine schools today. It is a theory , however, which has never been substantiated by any evidence, linguistic or archaeological.