Revisiting Inonhan: A sequel to the dialectology of Inonhan in Carabao Island, Romblon

Presentation Date: 

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Location: 

12th Philippine Linguistics Congress, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City

This paper revisits the dialectology research done on Inonhan, language spoken in Carabao Island, Romblon, the rationale of which was the claim of the residents that there existed various speech habits in the different population centres (sitios) within the locality (cf. Javier, 2012). An examination of the percentage of cognate forms showed that they were indeed dialects of the same language (no less than 80 per cent cognancy); however, the apparently erratic behaviour of probable isogloss bundles in some areas posed an essential twofold problem. On the one hand, the percentage differences that spell a dialectal difference among some of the communities are significant that they cannot be disregarded. On the other hand, isogloss bundles cannot be established and it is then hypothesised that the lexical items that were considered as identifying features of those sitios were actually loanwords from the languages of the neighbouring islands or communities. For this research, the author will attempt to look for the origins of the words collected from the different population centres and trace the languages that each of the lexical items were borrowed from. Some sociolinguistic factors concerning the dynamics of the population and communal activities will be taken into account in order to fully apprehend the seemingly linguistic/dialectal diversity within the island.