Similarities And Dissimilarities In Meaning And Usage Of Some Cebuano And Tagalog Words

The Philippine Islands, with a population of over ninety-seven million is comprised of seven thousand one hundred seventy islands with residents speaking seven hundred different dialects. Prominent among all the dialects are the Tagalog and Cebuano, widely spoken in many places in the archipelago. Tagalog, being renamed as Filipino, officially became the national language. Although considered as the designated national language known as the Filipino language, Tagalog originally was spoken only in the capital city, Manila compared to Cebuano which is widely spoken in the Visayas and Mindanao. Neighboring provinces in Luzon have their own spoken dialect such as Ilocano in the Ilocos region (northern Luzon), Bicolano in the Bicol region (lower eastern Luzon), Pampangueno in the central plain region, Caviteno in the lower western Region, and Tagalog in the lower southern region. The Cebuano dialect is spoken and understood in the Visayas and Mindanao regions in spite of their local dialects. There are also Cebuano speaking families living in some parts of Luzon. The Ilonggo in western Visayas, Waray in Samar and Leyte in eastern Visayas, and Boholano for people in Bohol in the southern Visayas are regional dialects, but these dialects have only minor deviations from the Cebuano dialect. People who speak the Cebuano dialect are called Bisaya even if they are living outside of the Cebu Province, as they comprise and represent the Visayas region. Where majority of the residents in the Mindanao region are from the Visayas, hence they are also called Bisaya.

Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change focuses on the influence of sociocultural terms on the forms of languages. The selection first underscores the sociocultural dimensions of language change and language evolution and speech style. Discussions focus on the relation of speech style and language evolution, linguistic evidence of language evolution, autonomy of code and style, language contact phenomena, and extension of the concept of language. The book then takes a look at speech and social prestige in the Belizian speech community; Japanese numeral classifiers; and speculations on the growth of ethnobotanical nomenclature. Topics include appearance of varietal names, differentiation and formation of specific names, six universal categories of ethnobotanical nomenclature, salience of speech, and prestige, social success, and language. The publication elaborates on color categorization in West Futunese; creolization and syntactic change in New Guinea Tok Pisin; relexification processes in Philippine Creole Spanish; and the historical and sociocultural aspects of the distribution of linguistic variants in highland Chiapas, Mexico. The selection is a valuable source of data for language experts and researchers interested in the sociocultural dimensions of language change.

This is a dictionary of Cebuano Visayan, the language of the central part of the Philippines and much of Mindanao. Although the explanations are given in English, the aim of this work is not to provide English equivalents but to explain Cebuano forms in terms of themselves. It is meant as a reference work for Cebuano speakers and as a tool for students of the Cebuano language. There is a total of some 25,000 entries and an addenda of 700 forms which were prepared after the dictionary had been composed. This dictionary is the product of eleven years work by more than a hundred persons. The work was edited by John Wolff but the sources are entirely native, and all illustrations are composed by native speakers. To date, this work probably represents the most authoritative dictionary of the Cebuano Visayan language.

The Philippines series of the PALI Language Texts, under the general editorship of Howard P. McKaughan, consists of lesson textbooks, grammars, and dictionaries for seven major Filipino languages.