Philippine Creole Spanish (Chabacano)

Philippine Creole Spanish, composed of the main local varieties Ternateño (spoken in the village of Ternate, Manila Bay), Caviteño (spoken in the San Roque neighborhood of Cavite City, Manila Bay), Zamboangueño (spoken in Zamboanga City, Mindanao), and known collectively as Chabacano, is the most extensive Spanish‑based creole language now in existence, the only one found outside of the Americas, and the only one without an African connection. The only dialect to have maintained and even increased its vitality is the Chabacano of Zamboanga (Zamboangueño), spoken by several hundred thousand residents of Zamboanga del Sur province (Mindanao) centering on Zamboanga City and nearby Basilan Island. A small group of Chabacano speakers is found in Cotabato City, Mindanao. Cotabatateño is virtually identical to Zamboangueño, with the few differences being mostly lexical. Although some form of creole Spanish may have existed in the Philippines as early as the 17^th century, any historical reconstruction is complicated by the almost complete lack of any reliable documentation prior to the turn of the 20^th century. During the Spanish regime, lasting from Legazpi’s 1565 expedition until 1899, there was no acknowledgment of any stable Spanish-derived pidgin or creole language in the Philippines. Thus reconstruction of the history of Chabacano is a daunting task that can be partially informed by contemporary field data. The majority of my research centers on Zamboanga Chabacano, a language that once borrowed heavily from modern Spanish and nearby Visayan languages, and which now is increasingly mixed with English and—in the past two decades—Tagalog. The frequent code-switching characteristic of Filipinos (most of whom speak several languages) is especially intense in Zamboanga, and contemporary Chabacano-English-Tagalog mixing and switching offers a broad spectrum of language-contact phenomena that can provide examples and counter-examples for models of language contact.

My research in the Philippines was partially supported by a Fulbright research fellowship and by the Embassy of Spain in Manila.

Representative publications:

• Características del español filipino y del chabacano. Historia cultural de la lengua española en Filipinas: ayer y hoy ed. Isacc Donoso Jiménez. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2012, pp. 307-323.
• El chabacano de Cavite en el centro del debate del lenguaje criollo. Perro Verde: Revista Cultural Hispano-Filipina 4 (2013), 46-56.
• Re-mixing a mixed language: The emergence of a new pronominal system in Chabacano (Philippine Creole Spanish). International Journal of Bilingualism 14(4), 2012, 448-478.
• Chabacano y español: resolviendo las ambigüedades. Lengua y migración 2(1) (2010), 5-41.
• Zamboangueño creole Spanish [with Maurizio Santoro]. Comparative creole syntax, ed. John Holm and Peter Patrick. London: Battlebridge Press, 2007, pp. 373-398.
• The place of Chabacano in the Philippine linguistic profile. Estudios de Sociolingüística vol. 2 no. 2 (2001), 119-163.
• El español criollo de Filipinas: el caso de Zamboanga. Estudios de sociolingüística, ed. Yolanda Lastra. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, 2000, pp. 339-366.
• The evolution of null subjects in Philippine Creole Spanish. 1994 Mid-America Linguistics Conference Papers, Volume II. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Linguistics Department, 1995, pp. 387-401.
• New thoughts on the origins of Zamboangueño (Philippine Creole Spanish). Language Sciences 14:3 (1992), 197-231.
• Philippine creole Spanish: reassessing the Portuguese element. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 104 (1988), 25-45.
• Phonological reduction in Philippine creole Spanish: implications for Hispanic dialectology. Language and language use: studies in Spanish, ed. T. Morgan, J. Lee, B. VanPatten. Washington: University Press of America, 1987, pp. 79‑96.
• Descriollización en el criollo hispanofilipino: el caso de Zamboanga. Revista Española de Lingüística 17 (1987), 37-56.
• The Portuguese element in Philippine Creole Spanish: a critical assessment. Philippine Journal of Linguistics, 1986, 1-17.
• Modern Spanish once-removed in Philippine creole Spanish: the case of Zamboanga. Language in Society 16 (1986), 91-108.