by John M. Lipski, The Pennsylvania State University ( presented with permission by author )
Introduction
In the linguistic profile of the Philippines, one of the most elusive elements to categorize and acknowledge the Spanish contribution. The amount of Spanish lexical incursions into the major Philippine language families is beyond dispute; less well understood is the extent to which the Spanish language is actively used and understood throughout the nation. Finally, and most germane to the topic of this symposium, is the inclusion, classification, and appreciation of a group of languages known to linguists as Philippine Creole Spanish, and to the speech communties themselves as Chabacano. Like many other creole languages, the name Chabacano itself stems from a derisive Spanish term meaning clumsy, ill-formed, and vulgar. Although within the PCS/Chabacano-speaking communities this word has lost the negative connotation and refers only to the language itself, many enlightened community members avoid the term Chabacano and prefer instead the regional designations of Caviteño, Ternateño, and especially Zamboangueño. Throughout the history of the Philippines Chabacano in its various manifestations has remained at the margins of the country's linguistic repertoire, ignored by many, repudiated by those who aware of its existence (this even includes many speech community members), ambiguously classified by Philippine language typologists, and truly appreciated only by the elite subset of professional linguists who specialize in creole languages. Even among this group the creole status of PCS is not undisputed, all of which combines to make PCS/Chabacano a linguistic orphan surrounded by patrimonial languages and the unchallenged carryovers of colonial times.1
The reasons for the low profile of Chabacano in the Philippine linguistic consciousness are many, the most salient of which include:
(1) General unawareness of a language which nowadays is spoken extensively only in a geographically remote portion of the country, Zamboanga City and surrounding parts of Zamboanga del Sur province, as well as in other pockets in Mindanao and the islands of Basilan and Jolo. Philippine Creole Spanish dialects were once spoken more extensively in the Ermita district of Manila as well as in other enclaves on Manila Bay (Cavite and Ternate), but most non-speakers
(2) Among those Filipinos with second-hand knowledge of Chabacano, the notion that this is in reality a dialect of Spanish, a colonial language increasingly marginalized in Philippine society. In the contemporary Philippines, fluency in Spanish
is generally restricted to a small and aging elite of mixed Philippine-Spanish heritage; the typical fluent Spanish speaker has at least one parent or grandparent born in Spain, and belongs to wealthy landowning or empresarial classes far-removed from the grass-roots level at which Chabacano is spoken. In Zamboanga, recent reintroductions of Spanish items (Lipski 1986a, 1987f) contribute to the mistaken notion that Zamboangueño Chabacano has been Spanish `all along,’ with only occasional deviations from standard usage.
(3) The mistaken notion among creolists (beginning with Whinnom 1956) that the largest Chabacano-speaking population, that of Zamboanga City, is small and moribund, when in fact it is a thriving first- and second-language speech community of
perhaps half a million speakers. Frake (1971) was the first to provide more accurate information on Zamboangueño, but to this day many scholars in the Philippines and abroad are unaware of the true strength of the Zamboanga Chabacano community.
(4) The fact that in the majority of surveys of Philippine languages (especially those produced within the Philippines, e.g. Llamzon 1978), none of the Chabacano varieties appears (at times `Spanish’ is listed), thus implicitly suggesting that
Chabacano is not a `Philippine' language.
(5) The historical confusion, found in literature, travelers’ accounts, and official documents, between Philippine varieties of Spanish, rudimentary Spanish-based pidgins and trade languages, and Spanish-derived creoles spoken natively by
Filipinos.
(6) The small number of native Spanish speakers in the Philippines has contributed to the lack of studies of contemporary Philippine Spanish; the majority of works which lay claim to such a description in reality deal with Hispanic lexical items
in native Philippine languages, or with some aspect of the PCS dialects. At times, the latter dialects are mistakenly referred to as "Philippine Spanish," as though there were no legitimate non-creolized variant of metropolitan Spanish currently available in the Philippines. One example of this confusion is the statement (Diez, Morales, Sabin 1977:85) that `En la actualidad la situación del español es bastante precaria ... el dialecto español que se habla en aquellas islas recibe el nombre de chabacano’ [currently, Spanish is in a precarious situation in
the Philippines ... the Spanish dialect spoken in
1. The Chabacano presence in the Philippines
The Philippines is the only former Spanish (colony) where the Spanish language was never acquired by the majority of the native population, and which replaced no native language. Among the other former
colonies, only Equatorial Guinea shows a similar profile, but this colony was not effectively occupied by Spain until the 1860's (Fernando Poo) or the first decades of the 20th century (Río Muni), with the total period under Spanish colonial rule being no more than 60-100 years. Even so, the majority of the population speaks Spanish, albeit as a second language with varying levels of ability (Lipski 1985). In the Philippines, a very small and rapidly dwindling population—mostly recent descendents of Spaniards—speaks Spanish
Although unknown to or ignored by most Filipinos, the Chabacano dialects are of importance to creolists. Philippine Creole Spanish is the only Spanish-based creole in Asia, fitting in with the Portuguese-based creoles in India, Sri Lanka, Malacca and
Macau; indeed, some (beginning with Whinnom 1956; cf. Lipski 1988 for differing views) assert that Philippine Creole Spanish is but a relexification of a pan-Asian Portuguese-based creole. All other Spanish-based creoles (Papiamentu, Afro-Colombian Palenquero, and vestigial enclaves found in Latin America) result from Afro-Hispanic language contacts, although some Hispano-Amerindian creoles may have existed in small numbers, and the possibility for a Hispano-Arabic creole as part of Mozarabic language cannot be totally discounted. Philippine creole
Spanish is also important for theories of creole language typology. It breaks from the usual SVO patterns, in exhibiting a prototypically Austronesian VSO, albeit with many alternative possibilities. The verbal syntax is both tantalizingly similar and vastly different from other Iberian-based creoles, and many other unique features accrue to PCS. In order to assess the situation of Chabacano in the pantheon of Philippine languages, it is necessary to survey the nature and distribution of non-creole
2. The Spanish language in the Philippines
The failure of the Spanish language to establish itself in the Philippines has been the subject of much prior commentary; suffice it to say that this linguistic situation stems from a combination of factors, among which are: the Spanish government's
official and non-official policy of using the vernacular languages, particularly in religious functions; the relatively small number of Spanish natives in comparison with the indigeneous Philippine population; the lack of significant demographic shifts among native groups in the Philippines which would have precipitated the necessary use of Spanish as a lingua franca. With the exception of the Chabacano dialects, which arose around Spanish military garrisons and spread in multilingual commercial centers, Spanish never became the native language of any
large sector of the native-born Filipino population, nor even became a widely used lingua franca outside of those (mestizo) groups most closely aligned with the colonial administration. With the coming of the American administration and the rapid and effective implementation of educational programs in English, Spanish was pushed ever further into the background, and its status as an obligatory part of the school curriculum is currently being called into question, as an apparent anachronism.
Currently, the majority of Spanish-speaking Filipinos belong to mestizo (Eurasian) families, directly descended from Spanish settlers. Moreover, this Spanish parentage is usually quite recent, in that nearly all Spanish speakers have at least one
grandparent who was born in Spain; few Spanish speakers are found who cannot claim a Spanish-born relative at least two generations in the past. This Spanish-speaking nucleus is strengthened by intermarriage, since most Spanish speakers have married other Spanish speakers or have otherwise reinforced their Spanish language environment, including membership in clubs or in the Casino Español (in Manila and Cebu), trips to Spain, and choice of residential area.
It is also possible to find non-mestizo Filipinos who for one reason or another learned Spanish through contact with previous generations of Spanish speakers, but the number of such individuals is small in comparison with the totality of Philippine
Spanish speakers. Spanish is still a subject in the university curriculum (despite current pressure to remove the requirement), and formerly Spanish was widely taught in the public schools. Although the majority of Filipinos who have studied Spanish under such circumstances have very little useful language ability, many individuals have a degree of passive competence which allows them to grasp the general meaning of Spanish phrases and expressions. Naturally, the high proportion of Hispanisms in the native Philippine languages aids in the recognition of
current Spanish forms, and older Filipinos may recall the presence of Spanish priests, nuns and lay teachers, particularly in private schools, all of whom helped spread an awareness of the Spanish language. Lawyers in the Philippines have often studied Spanish more carefully, since much of the legal code was written in Spanish, and until relatively recently it was possible to use the Spanish language in the courtroom. Many Filipina nuns studied in convents directed by Spanish priests and nuns, where
A concomitant feature of most Philippine Spanish speakers is their socioeconomic level, which is usually toward the top of the scale. Spanish speakers are frequently members of Spanish landowning and commercial families, which have managed to retain and
even expand their fortunes throughout the various post-colonial administrations in the Philippines. Naturally, not all such families have retained their wealth and social position, and there are other Spanish-speaking families which clearly belong to the middle classes, but among the wealthier Spanish speakers, use of the language is regarded as a source of pride and an unmistakable mark of aristocratic authenticity. These Spanish speakers continue to use the language at home, although it is difficult to use Spanish in public, due to general lack of
interlocutors and a certain
Currently, the largest number of Spanish-speaking Filipinos is found in metropolitan Manila, although significant smaller groups are located in many provincial capitals, particularly in those regions characterized by large plantations and estates which
have existed since the Spanish period. Among the latter zones are the sugar-producing regions of Negros (particularly in Bacolod but also around Dumaguete) and the fruit-producing regions of Mindanao, especially around Cagayan de Oro and Davao. Other nuclei of Spanish speakers are found in the Bikol area (Legaspi City and Naga), Iloilo, Tacloban, Cotabato, Vigan, Cebu and Zamboanga, being in the latter case bilectal Spanish-Chabacano speakers. Although the totality of the regions mentioned above represents a wide selection of
regional languages, including Tagalog, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Cebuano/Visayan, Waray, etc., there has been virtually no regionalized influence of these languages on Philippine Spanish, in that it is in general impossible to distinguish the geographical origin of a Spanish-speaking Filipino through features of spoken Spanish (unlike the case with spoken English).
The specific linguistic features of Philippine Spanish are of interest to the present enterprise only to the extent that they intersect with Chabacano and reflect the integration of both languages into a pan-Philippine linguistic matrix (Lipski 1987c,
1987d, 1987e). Phonetically, Philippine Spanish differs from other natively-spoken varieties in maintaining a uniformly
In other respects, Philippine Spanish retains a strongly resistant syllable-final /s/, unlike the Andalusian dialects that apparently provided the input to Manila Bay Chabacano dialects and most probably Zamboangueño as well (Lipski 1986b, 1987a).
Word-final /n/ receives a uniformly alveolar articulation [n] in Philippine Spanish, despite the high frequency of
Another outstanding characteristic of Philippine Spanish is the frequency of the glottal stop [q] at the beginning of words which nominally begin with a vowel: el hombre [el-qom-bre] `the man.' This is contrary to the normal Spanish phonotactic linking
of word-final consonants to syllable-initial position if the following word begins with a vowel; in other Spanish dialects, the corresponding pronunciation would be [e-lom-bre]. The glottal occlusion [q] is also heard in some hiatus combinations, such as maíz [ma-qis] `corn,' the same pronunciation as is used among the native Philippine languages. Due to the extraordinary use of [q], the normal consonantal linking typical of Spanish phonetics does not as frequently occur in Philippine Spanish, with the result that phonetic boundaries between words are
clearly perceivable in the spoken chain. This feature, evidently the result of influence from native Philippine languages, is found in the speech of nearly all contemporary Philippine Spanish speakers, regardless of their claimed or actual proficiency in Philippine languages; it is possible, however, that earlier generations of Spanish speakers, many of whom were nearly monolingual, may not have
3. Early attestations of Chabacano and Spanish-based pidgins in the Philippines
Frake (1971: 223-224) is unequivocal in his classification of Chabacano, including Zamboangueño (the main focus of his article): Philippine Creole Spanish is not simply a Philippine language with unusually heavy
Spanish lexical influence, nor is it Spanish with a large number of Philippine loan words. It is a distinct language, easily distinguishable from both its Romance and its Austronesian progenitors ... Philippine Creole Spanish shares enough in common with the classic creoles of the Caribbean that no one ... would, I think, challenge its assignment to the category `creole language.'
Despite Frake's impressive range of data and analysis, some of these conclusions are subject to reinterpretation. In particular, the notion that Chabacano is, or has always been, `easily distinguishable' from its Philippine language neighbors is not
supported by the full range of available evidence. Moreover, although Z is definitively a creole, as are the remaining Chabacano dialects, its inevitable and undiluted origin in the Manila Bay Chabacano dialects is not a foregone conclusion.
One of the difficulties in tracing the presence and development of Chabacano in the Philippines is the common confusion of a coherent creole language with `broken Spanish' or even fluent Spanish. This is true not only for the greater Manila area, but
also for the developing Spanish-derived creole of Zamboanga. Early visits to Zamboanga, in 1772 (Sonnerat
Some Spanish was apparently spoken in the Sulu Sea early in the 19th century. Moor (1837: 37) mentions Moslem Datus on Jolo who spoke Spanish, a fact also noticed by Yvan (1855: 230), and Saleeby (1980: 164-5). However, visitors to Zamboanga during the
same period still note only Spanish (spoken by Spanish troops) or else `Moro' as spoken by Muslims from Jolo. This includes Keppel (1853: 70f.), St. John (1853: 131-2), Marryat (1848), Mallat (1846) and many others. In fact the general lack of knowledge of Spanish among Filipinos was frequently commented on by visitors to the islands. Bowring (1859: 28) speaking of the Manila working class, estimated that not one in a hundred spoke or understood Spanish. Lannoy (1849: 33) observed that indigenous political leaders were required to speak Spanish, but that
this requirement was not enforced. Of Zamboanga, Lannoy noted that the garrison had roughly 380 men, of which were 11 were officers, 6 were sub-officers, and 24 were corporals. Of the linguistic and cultural problems, he noted (pp. 71-2) that `près de la moitié des officiers subalternes dans les régiments sont des indigènes, parlant la langue du soldat et jalousant les officiers espagnols, que parviennent seuls aux grades supérieurs. C'est là une cause constante de
Also instructive of the existence of Chabacano dialects in Zamboanga and elsewhere, and of the awareness of such varieties by outsiders, are observers' lists of languages spoken in each area of the Philippines. Jagor (1875: 55-6) assigned Spanish and
Tagalog in that order to Cavite; Tagalog, Spanish, and Chinese to Manila; Spanish and Manobo to Cotabato; and `Mandaya' and Spanish to Zamboanga. Escosura and Cañamaque (1882: xxiii), writing in the 1860's, assign Spanish and Tagalog to Cavite; Tagalog, Spanish, and Chinese to Manila; Spanish and `Moro' to Basilan; and only Spanish to Zamboanga. This would indicate that Zamboanga was the most Spanish-speaking area of the Philippines in the mid 19th century. However, the same authors (p. 5) lament that native Filipinos speak only español de cocina, so
that the designation `Spanish' assigned to Cavite, Manila and Zamboanga could well represent a Spanish pidgin, if not PCS. The information sifted and analyzed by Schuchardt (1883) would suggest that `Malayo-Spanish' was more typical of Manila and Cavite, and that Zamboanga might actually be Spanish-speaking.
The paucity of documentation on the language(s) spoken in colonial Zamboanga and the ambiguity of the existent attestations is surprising in view of the strategic importance of this port, the southernmost city in Spanish-controlled Philippines.
Zamboanga was a way-station for travellers from every direction, and was constantly visited by Spaniards and foreigners alike. For the Spanish government, Zamboanga continued to be an important military defense against
Authentic `kitchen Spanish' was used only between native Filipinos and Chinese merchants, or between these groups and Spaniards, much as the `bamboo Spanish' of Mindanao came to be used among and with Japanese arrivals in the early 20th century. It was
never used natively, and was never used mutually by Philippine residents who spoke a common native language. In particular, the term `kitchen Spanish' was never applied to true PCS varieties such as C or T, except in error. For example, Montero y Vidal (1876: 97) offers the following excerpt from a conversation between a Spaniard recently arrived in the Philippines and a compatriot with long residence in the islands: `---¿Y eso de que los criados entienden todas las cosas al revés? ---Aprenda a hablarles en el idioma sui generis, que llamamos aquí
español de
There are also many examples of Philippine pidgin Spanish as used by native Filipinos, with some creoloid characteristics but still representing an imperfectly acquired second language:
No puede, ama; aquel matandá Juancho, casado también `[it] isn't possible, ma'am; that no-good Juancho is also married' ¿Cosa va a hacer ya si nació viva? Siguro yo pegué plojo aquel día `what can [I] do if [the baby] was born alive? I must have been wrong that day.' (Rincón 1897: 22-3)
Pues suya cuidado, pero esa tiene novio castila y seguro no ha de querer con suya `That's your business, but that woman has a Spanish boyfriend and she surely won't have anything to do with you' (Montero y Vidal 1876: 240)
Mira, jablá tú con aquel tu tata que no suelte el cualtas `Hey, tell your father not to give out the money' (López 1893: 35)
Camino, señor bueno `The road [is] good, sir'
Usted señor, bajar, y yo apartar animales `You sir, will get down [from the carriage]; I will disperse the animals'
Señor, malo este puente `Sir, this bridge [is] no good' (Feced 1888: 20-1)
Bueno, señor, aquí comer `Well, sir, here [you can] eat' (Feced 1888: 24)
Ese palo largo con cordeles atados a su punta y a las puntas de los cordeles anzuelos, cosa buena, señor. Cuando se escapa un preso, corro yo tras de él, se lo echo encima y queda cogido. `Sir, that long stick with ropes tied to the end and hooks on the
ends of the ropes is a good thing. When a prisoner escapes, I run after him and I throw the thing over him, and he's caught' (Feced 1888: 34)
No hay ya, siñol; pudo quedá sin el plasa, porque sisante hace tiempo, cuando aquel cosa del flata ... pero no necesitá `He [doesn't work there] any more, sir; he lost the job, he's been out of work for some time, since the time of the money affair, but
[he] doesn't need [it] (Rincón 1896: 16-17)
Siguro ha roto aquel rienda, pero en un poco arreglarlo `Those reins have probably broken, but [I] can fix them in a short time' (Rincón 1896: 27)
Metapísico pa, premature no más! Con que no se concibe, ja? `A metaphysician, eh? You’re premature. So you don’t know, eh?’ (Rizal 1891:98) {mockingly said by a Spanish professor to a Philippine student}
Usté ya no más cuidado con mi viuda y mis huérfanos `You won’t take care of my widow and my orphan children’ (Rizal 1891:222)
None of these examples was presented as an instance of Chabacano; most were proffered as illustrations of imperfect acquisition of Spanish by natives of the Philippines, while other examples were presented without comment as `Philippine Spanish.'
Nonetheless, the last set of examples represents neither creolized Spanish nor Chinese Spanish pidgin, but rather a wide gamut of L2 approximations to European Spanish by Filipinos who had only occasional opportunities to learn and speak Spanish. A comparison of Chabacano and Philippine `bamboo Spanish' shows that the latter shares some of the creoloid features of the former: word order, gravitation towards the 3 s. verb form, some Philippine and Spanish-derived particles, use of cosa as interrogative word, and some aorist constructions (derived from the
Spanish infinitive) without TMA particles. However, `bamboo Spanish' lacks the full range of grammatical structures found in Philippine Creole Spanish, and to the extent that it was based on foreigner-talk proffered by expatriate Spaniards, makes greater use of the bare infinitive than occurs in actual Philippine L2 Spanish.
Finally, a few attestations of legitimate Chabacano crop up in late 19 th century literary texts, invariably from Cavite or Manila, and never identified explicitly as anything other than `broken Spanish’:
si vos quiere, yo ta emprestá con V. cuatro pesos para el fiestajan del bautizo `if you wish, I can lend you four pesos for the baptism celebration' (Rincón 1897:22-3) Siguro ese aquel que ta mandá prendé cunisós `He’s probably the one that had us
arrested’ (López 1893:35)
¿Ya cogí ba con Tadeo? `Did they catch Tadeo yet?’ (Rizal 1891:220)
No jablá vos puelte, ñora, baká pa di quedá vos cómplice. Ya quemá yo ñga el libro que ya dale prestau conmigo. Baká pa di riquisá y di encontrá. Anda vos listo, ñora.
`Don’t speak so loud, ma’am, or you’ll be taken for an accomplice. I burned the book that [he] loaned me. Otherwise they could search and find [it]. Be careful, ma;am’ (Rizal 1891:220)
Conmigo no ta debí nada. Y cosa di jasé Paulita? `He doesn’t owe me anything. And what will Paulita do?’ (Rizal 1891:220)
These examples show the preverbal particle ta, the future/irrealis particle di, the accusative/dative marker con, and the first-person plural pronoun nisós, found in Cavite and formerly in Ermita (the Ternate form is mihotro, while Zamboanga has kamé
[exclusive] and kitá [inclusive].
Despite the initial improbability, it is conceivable that Philippine residents of Zamboanga were in fact speaking Spanish at the time the earlier travel accounts were written, at least a close enough approximation to Spanish which Spaniards and other
foreign observers would regard as a legitimate approximation to international standards, and not simply `kitchen Spanish.' The current grammatical structure of Z differs significantly from any variety of Spanish, and the two languages are to a large extent mutually non-intelligible between non-initiated speakers of each language. Thus the notion that any non-creolized form of Spanish was spoken in Zamboanga by native Filipinos initially seems unlikely; however, additional evidence deriving from reconstruction and extrapolation from current configurations
suggests that this notion may be
It is apparent that Mrs. Dauncey was ignorant of legitimately `Castilian' usage, where among other features the realization of -ado as -ao is frequent and socially accepted. Given her silence on more substantive grammatical matters (despite her claim
that grammatical textbooks were of no use), we are left with no useful description of Philippine Spanish. Indeed, non-creole Spanish of the Philippines is quite close to Peninsular `Castilian' models, being spoken largely by families with recent ancestors from Spain, and differing from the dialects of the latter country mainly in pronunciation and the occasional slight grammatical or lexical difference. Dauncey's evident inability to understand the `Spanish' of the Philippines constitutes evidence that PCS is what she encountered, despite the lack of
corroborative evidence that any Spanish-based creole was ever spoken outside of the Manila Bay enclaves and the previously-mentioned cities of
Z continues to be a vigorous living language, whose oldest living speakers were born towards the end of the 19th century, and who often recall even earlier speech patterns. Thus it is possible, through a combination of fieldwork
and oral history, to at least partially reconstruct the linguistic situation of Zamboanga as far back as the middle of the 19th century, with some measure of certainty. This should allow the ambiguous and confusing travellers' accounts to be confronted with hard data, enabling a more accurate picture to emerge. In practice, despite the ready availability of field informants, matters are not always so simple. In my own fieldwork, residents of Zamboanga who had been born in the late 1800's were interviewed, as well as
younger residents who accurately recalled the speech of parents and grandparents born even
Probing the existing population of Z speakers, and attempting to push back the time base for reconstructing the immediate precursor of Z leads back to the same indeterminacy and apparent muddle concerning the relationship between `Spanish' and Z as a
legitimately different form of Chabacano. At the crux of the dilemma is the underlying assumption that the Spanish-based contact languages known collectively as Chabacano are the result of total creolization, i.e. representing an abrupt break from the patrimonial Spanish which was brought to the Philippines. According to such a belief, the only possible scenario for the inability to assign an element unambiguously to `Spanish' or `Chabacano' is some type of `post-creole continuum,' in which decreolization or
reintroduction of Spanish results in a more `Hispanized' Chabacano. The facts regarding Z point in the opposite direction, however. Spanish, at any level of fluency, has all but disappeared from Zamboanga City and its environs (except for some unadulterated Spanish forms reintroduced by radio broadcasters--cf. Lipski 1986a, 1987f--which, however show no signs of spreading to general usage). A century ago, however, Spanish was more widely known, and the further back in time the probe is pushed, the blurrier becomes the `Spanish'/`Chabacano'
4. Towards a theory of the formation of Zamboangueño
Most descriptions of PCS have not distinguished between Z and the Manila Bay varieties, assuming implicitly or explicitly that Z is simply the offspring of an earlier transplant of Manila Bay PCS. Whinnom
(1956:3) hypothesized that the formation of the PCS dialects, including Z, was the result of linguistic and cultural mestizaje between Spanish-speaking garrison troops (soldiers from the lowest social classes) and Malay speakers: `only the convivence, and indeed
Frake (1971) implicitly accepts Whinnom's hypothesis of the garrison-troop origin of Z, but makes the intriguing observation that many of the contemporary Philippine items in Z do not come from the geographically contiguous Visayan languages, but from
Hiligaynon (Ilongo), spoken in the Central Philippines. Most of the words in question are lexical items with no particular semantic restrictions, but a number of core syntactic items are included. Frake gives no explanation for the presence of Ilongo items in Z, except to suggest that many garrison troops probably came from the Ilongo-speaking area. There may be additional or alternative routes of penetration; for example, Iloilo (the principle city in the Ilongo region) was one of the main stopover ports for ships travelling from Manila to Zamboanga
(Warren 1981), and it is likely that Ilongo speakers were picked up along the way. Another potential missing link in the evolution and spread of the various PCS dialects comes from the indirect evidence that when Zamboanga was rebuilt in 1719, many PCS-speaking families from Cavite emigrated to Zamboanga, with some remaining in Iloilo (Germán 1984). Although PCS never became implanted in Iloilo, if family ties existed between Iloilo and Zamboanga, including the possibility for subsequent migration of settlers originally stopping in Iloilo, Ilongo words
could have arrived in Zamboanga by this means. Maria Isabelita Riego de Dios (personal communication) has also discovered that many laborers were recruited from Panay (the main island where Ilongo was spoken) during the time period when Zamboanga and Cotabato were building up their military defenses, and she suggests that the Ilongo elements in the PCS dialects of both cities is a direct result of this immigration.
Much of the failure to separate the formation of Z from the Manila Bay PCS varieties comes from the status of the latter creoles in theories of Iberian-based creole formation. Whinnom (1956) was the first to
hint at a possibility which was later to become a full-fledged theory, namely that a large number of Asian-Iberian creoles, from India to Indonesia and
Despite Whinnom's pioneering contributions on the origins of the Manila Bay PCS dialects, his description of Z is sketchy, inaccurate, and based on second-hand sources. He assumed, naturally enough, that some form of Manila Bay PCS had been carried to
the Spanish garrison at Zamboanga, where it continued to flourish and evolve; any differences between Z and the Manila Bay PCS dialects were presumably the result of local accretions rather than from a separate formative process. Subsequent in-depth investigations of Z, such as Frake (1971, 1980) and Forman (1972) implicitly assume some version of Whinnom's hypothesis. In view of the significant structural similarities between Z on the one hand and C and T on the other, it is not feasible to claim totally independent creolization in Zamboanga. However,
additional evidence
In a later account, Worcester (1930: 512) noted that `Zamboanga was at the outset populated by escaped Moro slaves who had sought the protection of the Spanish garrison there. Coming originally from widely separated parts of the archipelago, these
unfortunates had no common native dialect, hence there arose among them a Spanish patois known as Zamboangueño.' Other descriptions of Zamboanga also speak of the mixed origins of its residents. Thus Vendrell y Eduard (1887:62), in speaking of Zamboanga, observed that `estos indgenas, la inmensa mayoría mestizos españoles, proceden en su origen de otras provincias del Archipélago, y muchos de Méjico, de donde llegaron á principios de este siglo, cuando perdimos aquel imperio’ [these indigenous people, the great majority of whom are Spanish mestizos, originally come from other provinces and from México, whence they arrived at the beginning of this
century when we lost that empire]. These accounts suggest that Z arose in situ as a contact vernacular among transients and freed slaves. While it is likely that the linguistic heterogeneity of the Zamboanga garrison and its environs was conducive to the evolution of whatever Spanish-based lingua franca was adopted there, it is not possible to accept that Z arose ab ovo in
Many other pieces of the Z puzzle can also be found in non-creolized Philippine Spanish. For example, the use of cosa as a generic interrogative is attested in Philippine Spanish, ranging from reasonably
fluent to `kitchen Spanish' varieties:
(Feced 1888: 68-69): `¿También redactarás las actas de las sesiones? ---¿Cosa eso, señor?' [Will you also take minutes of the meetings? What is that, sir?] (Feced 1888: 91): `Quiero decir que tendrás muchos galanes. ---¿Cosa galanes?' [I mean that you
must have many beaus. What are beaus?] Montero y Vidal (1876: 239): `¿Cosa, señolía?' [what is it, sir?]. (López (1893: 34): `¿Cosa? preguntó el maestro' [What is it? asked the teacher]. (Entrala 1882: 12): `¿Cosa dice?' [what is he saying?]. (Entrala 1882: 22): `Cosa Goyo? ... cosa tiene?' [What is it, Goyo? ... what is there?] The latter quote also exemplifies the use of affirmative tiene to indicate `there is/are,'
also found in Entrala (1882: 22): `Tiene canin, tiene nata, tiene coco ... ' [there is {cooked} rice, there is cream, there are coconuts ...]. Other interrogative words are used similarly, for example cual (Entrala 1882: 32): `Cual aquel?' [which one is that?]. PCS varieties, including Z, are characterized by an invariable verbal stem, usually derived from the infinitive minus final /r/. In the case of `modal' verbs and some other verbs, the third person singular form has been taken over: puede, tiene, sabe,
etc. Vestigial and semifluent Spanish of many countries is noted for the gravitation of verbal paradigms to the third person singular, an attestation of partial agreement. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese employs this strategy, as do vestigial dialects of Spanish. In contemporary Philippine Spanish, vestigial speakers occasionally reduce verbs to the third person singular. This is by no means an
(López 1893: 58): `¡Ah! señolia, mucho disgustalo ele con suya, polque señolia manda plendé con ele' [Oh sir, he is very angry with you, because you had him arrested]. A characteristic of Z, calquing a wide
variety of Philippine languages, is the lack of copula with Adj + Noun combinations. The same combinations are attested for non-creole Philippine Spanish:
Señor, malo este bache ... malo este puente grande `Sir, this pot hole {is} bad ... this big bridge {is} bad' (Feced 1888: 21)
Seguro tú grande el robo `You {can be} sure {it was a} big robbery' Entrala (1882: 22) V. magandang lalaque; fino el talle, bueno el cara `You are a fine lad; slim-waisted, good-looking' Entrala (1882: 23) pero malo ese ... `but that guy is bad' López
(1893: 34)
The preceding examples show that Philippine Spanish, developing slowly throughout the major population centers of the islands and incorporating calques of regional Philippine languages, already contained the seeds of many creoloid structures, which when
added to the mix of Spanish and cognate Philippine elements in the formative period of Z would enhance emerging creole structures. Philippine Spanish, at lower levels of fluency, also embodies considerable grammatical simplification which does not specifically reflect Philippine syntax, but which is common to reduced and vestigial forms of Spanish of other nations. Even in the 20 th century, travelers continued to describe rudimentary Philippine Spanish with the same terms used in previous centuries. Russell (1907) refers to the use of `broken Spanish'
in several parts of the country, and at one point a man spoke to her in `what he was pleased to consider Spanish' (p. 81). Correa de Malvehy (1908:109), visiting the Philippines towards the end of the 19th century, makes similar reference to the fact that `también se habla generalmente en español más ó menos incorrecto, siendo la lengua oficial de la colonia y general de Manila' [more or less incorrect Spanish is also spoken, being the official language of the colony and generalized in Manila]. She also referred (e.g. p. 17) to the `broken
Spanish' used by many Filipinos, and even gave an example (p. 135): `¡Calla castila, que corta aquel cabeza tuyo!' [shut up white woman, or I'll cut off your head]. Studies of contemporary Philippine Spanish by Lipski (1986b, 1987a) reveal the continued existence of similar structures, which when taken in their totality closely resemble the PCS dialects in many respects.
The examples just given show that many of the important building blocks which would coalesce to form Z were present in non-creole varieties of Philippine Spanish, as spoken by Filipinos and evidently also by Spaniards at times, in order to enhance
communication. None of the examples comes from PCS-speaking communities, but rather provide a cross-section of usage which, extrapolating backwards only a few decades, could have been found in the rudimentary knowledge of Spanish shared by Spaniards, Philippine garrison troops, and former slaves in Zamboanga. These features alone do not suffice to explain all the creoloid traits in Z. However, in combination with the Philippine common denominators surveyed in the preceding section, nearly all the major
structures of Z can be accounted for without postulating a transplantation of a functioning PCS speech community to Zamboanga.
In partial summary, it has been proposed that Z did not arise as a radical creole from purely Spanish roots. Z came into being as residents of Zamboanga, both those of long standing and new arrivals, enhanced inter-ethnic communicability by drawing ever
more heavily on the one extraterritorial language which had already begun to bridge the gap, namely Spanish. In Zamboanga, Spanish in its native or quasi-native form was principally the vehicle of some of the garrison soldiers (especially those from Mexico) and their commanding officers. This would account for both the phonologically more modern form of many Spanish items in Z and the noticeably vulgar, barracks-like nature of many of the borrowings. Items derived from earlier periods of Spanish are probably actually derived from Philippine languages,
which began
The first stage of Z is assumed to have consisted mostly of Spanish items and of only the broadest Philippine common denominators such as the plural particle mga, interrogative particle ba, plus a few Ilongo words. Cebuano/Visayan accretions came later.
Immigration to southwestern Mindanao of speakers of central Visayan languages, particularly Cebuano, became significant towards the end of the 19th century, a population shift rivaled in attested Philippine
To conclude the proposed reconstruction of Z, this language came into existence as an independent language towards the middle of the 18th century. This language has an especially rich history of partial relexifications, in a region characterized by
multilingual contacts and a very fluid series of demographic movements. Z began not as a true creole, but as a natural common intersection of grammatically cognate Philippine languages which had already incorporated a lexical core of Spanish borrowings. The pool of speakers who provided the original input for Z did not constitute a single group, but included garrison troops, transients and later, former slaves recaptured from Moslem territories to the south. Over the period of a century and a half, Z partially relexified in a number of directions, with
each stage of relexification
STAGE I: (mid 1700's) Z arises in the Zamboanga garrison, as the common intersection of Spanish-laden Philippine languages.
STAGE II: (mid-late 1700's). Z absorbs grammatical and lexical structures from Manila Bay PCS, as the Spanish military presence in Zamboanga is consolidated. Additional migrations of civilians from Cavite have a trickle-down effect on Z.
STAGE III: (1800's ?). Ilongo lexical elements are introduced into Z, possibly as the result of the use of Iloilo as a stopover for ships bound from Manila to Zamboanga. Ilongo grammatical forms could have been introduced at this time.
STAGE IV: (most of 1800's). Increasing presence of (civilian) native Spanish speakers in Zamboanga City results in incorporation of additional Spanish items, with structural differences between Z and (Philippine) Spanish reaching their alltime low point.
STAGE V: (Turn of 20th century onward). Large-scale immigration from the central Visayan region to southwestern Mindanao makes Cebuano Visayan the de facto number two language in Zamboanga City. Spanish lexical items are increasingly replaced by Visayan items. Word order begins to shift towards Visayan.
STAGE VI: (1930's onward). Increasing use of English in Zamboanga, not only in schools but even in casual conversations, results in growing incorporation of Anglicisms into Z. In the last two generations, this is leading the way to an eventual relexification of Zamboangueño away from its Hispanic lexical basis.
The reconstructed stages proposed above paint a picture considerably different from `typical' creole genesis occurring in other parts of the world, and explain the typological differences between Z and other Spanish-based creoles. This includes word
order, use of particles, structure of the VP and NP, and many other features. Even among the PCS dialects, Z differs substantially from the Manila Bay PCS dialects, despite the fact that the adstratum Philippine languages in contact with Z and the Manila Bay PCS dialects are cognate and similar in basic structure. The difference, as outlined above, lies in the fact that the Manila Bay PCS dialects, especially T, apparently began life as true creoles, based on a nearly exclusively Spanish input (possibly with some creole Portuguese contributions), with
Philippine elements added only later, without altering the basic patterns already developed. Z, on the other hand, began life as a hybrid pan-Philippine contact language whose Spanish items had already been filtered through Philippine languages, and which was therefore a Philippine language in the structural sense at every point during its existence.
5. The current status of Chabacano in the Philippines
Chabacano is currently spoken by a small number of elderly individuals in Cavite (especially the San Roque neighborhood), who may intersperse Chabacano expressions with the more frequently used Tagalog when speaking amongst themselves. A Circulo
Chabacano informal group has from time to time attempted to revive the language, and church and town festival bulletins sometimes contains poems or sayings in Chabacano. In Ternate an equally small number of Ternateño speakers remains, but it appears that the average age of the speakers is somewhat younger. There is no indication that children in either community are being taught the language or even have opportunities to hear it. Ermita Chabacano has disappeared, although a few vestigial speakers undoubtedly remain somewhere in the Metro Manila area.
It is in Zamboanga City and its environs that the Zamboangueño variety of Chabacano makes this the
Zamboanga City is one of the most thoroughly Hispanized cities remaining in the Philippines, and at one time, culminating in the first decades of the present century, some form of the Spanish language circulated rather widely in that city. Several Spanish-language newspapers were published until World War II, Spanish was used by (Spanish national) priests, and signs and announcements in Spanish were frequently seen about town. Although the general feeling among Zamboangueños is that Zamboanga was at least partially Spanish-speaking towards the end of the Spanish period and in the decades immediately following, it is more reasonable to suppose that