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Journal of Sociolinguistics 10:3 (2006) pp. 399-402
Book Review: Robert A. Scebold, Central Tagbanwa: A Philippine Language on the Brink of Extinction. Linguistic Society of the Philippines Special Monograph Series 48. Manila: LSP and SIL, 2003. xiii, 168 pp.
by Frank Smedley, School of Languages, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
This book is a small part of the noteworthy linguistic endeavors of SIL. ...The author sets this contribution in the context of the stark reality of language loss. ...The book gives the results of a sociolinguistic survey into Central Tagbanwa, an endangered language on the island of Palawan. ...
Chapter 1 gives a very brief historical background. ...[T]hree key players contributing to the present precarious status of Central Tagbanwa are: a great reduction in the population during World War Two; the enormous amount of post-war in-migration of other Filipinos to Palawan; and the implementation of Tagalog-based Filipino as the national language with its prestige and dominance in key language domains and the media. ...An additional factor in the attrition of Tagbanwa speakers has been the impact of a local trade language, Cuyunon.
Chapter 2 examines some sociolinguistic dimensions of Central Tagbanwa. ...Scebold [suggests] that perhaps as few as two hundred may be mother--tongue speakers in the language. ...Scebold proceeds to detail a survey of the demographics of Tagbanwa use and its propagation between generations. ...The methodology is primarily one of Interview supported by observation. Three case histories of families are presented. ...
Chapter 3 looks at phonology and the most surprising fact here was the difficulty in allocating stress given the ambiguity in both live and recorded data. ...Two other points of particular interest [are] [t]he presence of a high central vowel ...which appears to be distinctive of some Palawan languages over against others in this same Meso-Philippine group (e.g. Tagalog and Cebuano). Secondly, there is a weakened and somewhat tenuous version of a voiced bilabial fricative ...which seems to occur ...in all environments. ...There is certainly no equivalent in Tagalog or Cebuano.
Chapter 4 is a brief grammatical sketch of the language examining morpho-syntactical, syntactical and semantic relations. All grammatical instances are accompanied with examples and translations. ...
The final chapter provides a kind of mini-lexicon. An appendix of three extended texts ...are especially valuable to those who already know other Philippine languages.
At a time when so many languages near the point of extinction, this book cannot help but be an important not only for its docu-mentation of a language that may die out, but also hopefully as a catalyst for those who may wish to move Central Tagbanwa from its moribund status to a renewed state of health.
Ogmios newsletter (Foundation for Endangered Languages)
January 2005
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Book Review of Robert A. Scebold: Central Tagbanwa - a Philippine Language on the Brink of Extinction, Manila: LSP 2003; ISBN 971-780-014-6
by Nicholas Ostler
This is a sketch grammar of Tagbanwa, an Austronesian language spoken in the northwest of the island of Palawan in the western Philippines. The speakers live in the Taytay and San Vicente municipalities. The book is based on Scebold's field work in Binga, a village more or less in the centre of this area, over two years from May 1991.
As an approach to writing this kind of work, it is interesting in that it begins with a sociolinguistic assessment of the past and current vitality of the speaker-community. Scebold gives case histories of the language abilities of members of three families, and gives a fair number of statistics. It is unsurprising that Tagbanwa is heavily threatened, when one reads of the changes in relative population figures.
In the whole of Palawan Island, the population, which stood at 6,200 in 1903 (all speakers of Tagbanwa and the closely related Palawanon), grew to 56,000 in 1948, and has now reached 600,000. The growth has come exclusively from settlers from elsewhere in the Philippines, who came to farm after the Second World War when development of anti-malarial drugs had made it easier for outsiders to survive in the region.
Tagbanwa traditions, in any case weakened by the shortlived Japanese invasion, had been to use low intensity methods of slash-and-burn farming. Now the few remaining Tagbanwa (under 1,000 in number) are of mixed parentage and highly bilingual, dominant in the local trade language Cuyunon (a Bisayan language with some 123,000 speakers) and Tagalog (the Philippine national language with 17 million). Scebold believes that the language is moribund given the population dynamics and the language attitudes he discovers, although at present there is still language use in all generations.
After 26 pages of history and sociolinguistic description, the book devotes 13 pages to phonology and 52 to grammar. It has a vocabulary with about 2400 head-words and some phrasal examples, and an English index to it.
Finally, it has three texts, which are short narratives that give some cultural colour, "The Tagbanwa Man who Found Gold", "The Boy that was Gotten by a Crocodile", and a conversation about ashfall from Mt Pinatubo, a volcano in Luzon island that erupted in 1991.
A taste of the language from this last:
Kita kuno magisturian kaya paglīpak ka Pinatubo; ay ya gusto niya matawanan ing ono ya damdamin o isipan ka mga tao kaya pagtīgpa ka avo. (He says we are to tell of the past eruption of Mt Pinatubo; he wants to know what the feelings or thoughts of the people were back when the ash fell.)
Isus! ay aburido ya mga tao ay disti liti maka inta a oras a nangyari. (Wow! People were anxious about it from the very time it happened.)
Ako ing ka vahay, alam ko no talaha ya hula ka Biblia. (As for me in this matter, I know that the prophecy of the Bible is true.)
Tagbanwa phonology is interesting in having received a far greater number of Spanish loans (italicized above) than Tagalog: the result has been a separate "phonology within the phonology" for this part of the lexis. The morphology is highly inflected apparently on an agglutinative basis, but with copious morphophonemic processes, e.g. of infixation and metathesis. The clausal grammar is expounded on a straightforward semantic basis (e.g. Conjunction/Addition, Temporal Relations, Condition-Consequence).
While not a "teach-yourself" manual, this is the kind of exposition that would make it relatively easy for outsiders to quickly grasp the basics of expression in the language, or perhaps for a linguist to reorganize as a pedagogical grammar. As such, it does not concentrate on any details of language relationships, or theoretical properties of the grammar.
There are four pages of bibliography, which range over the sociolinguistics of education and language survival, the analysis of related languages, and fields of theoretical linguistics. The work should serve as a useful document of the language (though Scebold, especially in his vocabulary, is quick to point out its incompleteness) as well as a well-informed description of what the last stages of a language-endangerment situation look like, when the incoming languages are just the neighbours, not globalized mega-languages.
Philippine Studies 51:4 (2003) pp. 653-654 [ Top ]
Book Review: Robert A. Scebold, Central Tagbanwa: A Philippine Language on the Brink of Extinction. Linguistic Society of the Philippines Special Monograph Series 48. Manila: LSP, 2003. xiii, 168 pp.
by Emy M. Pascasio, Ateneo Language Center, Ateneo de Manila University
Sociolinguistic factors such as schools, local government, mass media, and interethnic marriages have contributed to make Central Tagbanwa an endangered language. If the current trend continues, the language will soon die out completely. In-migration of non-Tagbanwa settlers from other islands after the Second World War to seek land and livelihood has been so extensive that Tagbanwas are now very much a minority in their own land. Furthermore, mother-tongue Tagbanwa speakers have become very proficient in languages of wider communicative reach and power such as English, Tagalog, and Cuyunon, and they have been teaching these to their children for decades-leading to substantial language and culture shifts.
As a result, the younger generations are ethnically more diverse and linguistically less proficient in Tagbanwa than prior generations. They are also more attuned to the wider world through more education and modern media.
With diversity of background, many young people have a choice as to which heritage to gravitate toward Tagbanwa, or the other side of the family. Some develop a strong sentiment toward maintaining a Tagbanwa identity. These young people often learn Tagbanwa despite the lack of it in their own homes. They wear it as a badge of identity. However, others gravitate more toward Cuyunon or Visayan; as a result they get assimilated into the wider culture.
Robert A. Scebold's volume contains a linguistic description of Central Tagbanwa spoken in northern Palawan in terms of its phonology, morphology, and morphophonemics. Although there is no full treat-ment of the grammar but simply an overview of the essential grammatical patterns in the language, it is still a significant contribution. Although the data table does not present nuanced or peripheral infor-mation, several case histories are included, organized along genealogical lines, all of which are rather interesting. Moreover, one whole chapter (Chapter 5) includes a sample of the Central Tagbanwa lexicon with an English index. The entries have been gathered from natural texts and word list data. Many entries contain only a headword, its part of speech, and an English gloss. Others contain a more detailed definition and other information gleaned from text analysis.
Another important contribution of this book is the natural texts recorded in the appendices. These texts consist of an oral narrative, a written narrative, and an oral conversation.
This book is an excellent undertaking, providing researchers from various fields, not only sociolinguists and ethnolinguists but also cultural anthropologists and historians, with the opportunity to acquire in-depth information derived from extensive fieldwork among the Central Tagbanwa speakers. The book in itself is not technical in its style and content; hence, even undergraduate students can use it as an easy reference on an endangered language such as the Central Tagbanwa.
Salita Blog Saturday August 6, 2005 [ Top ]
Book Review: Robert A. Scebold, Central Tagbanwa: A Philippine Language on the Brink of Extinction. Linguistic Society of the Philippines Special Monograph Series 48. Manila: LSP and SIL, 2003. xiii, 168 pp.
by Christopher Sandita. Click for Salita Blog
