Ilokano language

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Ilokano
Spoken in:	Philippines
Region:	Northern Luzon
Total speakers:	7.7 million, est. 2.3 million second language = 10 million total
Ranking:	75
Language family:	Austronesian  Malayo-Polynesian   Borneo-Philippines    Northern Philippine     Northern Luzon      Ilokano
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	ilo
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	ilo
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Ilokano (variants: Ilocano, Iluko, Iloco, and Iloko) is the third most-spoken language of the Republic of the Philippines.

Being an Austronesian language, it is related to such languages as Indonesian, Malay, Fijian, Maori (of New Zealand), Hawaiian, Malagasy (of Madagascar), Samoan, Tahitian,Chamorro (of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), Tetum (of East Timor), and Paiwan (of Taiwan).

Contents 1 History 2 Classification 2.1 Dialects 3 Geographic distribution 4 Writing system 4.1 Pre-Colonial 4.2 Colonial 4.3 Modern 4.3.1 System Comparison 5 Literature 6 Phonology 6.1 Segemental 6.1.1 Vowels 6.1.2 Diphthongs 6.1.3 Consonants 6.2 Suprasegmental 6.2.1 Syllable 6.2.2 Stress Accent 7 Grammar 8 Lexicon 8.1 Borrowings 8.2 Common expressions 8.3 Numbers (Bilang), Days, Months 9 More Ilokano words 10 See also 11 Notes 12 External links

[edit] History

Ilokanos are descendants of Austronesian-speaking people from southern China via Taiwan. Families and clans arrived by viray or bilog, meaning boat. The term Ilokano originated from i-, meaning "from", and looc, meaning "cove or bay", thus "people of the bay." Ilokanos also refer to themselves as Samtoy, a contraction from the Ilokano phrase saö mi ditoy, meaning "our language here".

[edit] Classification

Ilokano comprises its own branch in the Philippine Cordilleran family of languages. It is spoken as a native language by eight million people.

A lingua franca of the northern region, it is spoken as a secondary language by more than two million people who are native speakers of Pangasinan, Ibanag, Ivatan, and other languages in Northern Luzon.

[edit] Dialects

Linguists recognize two main dialect groups in Ilokano: northern and southern. The northern group of subdialects is generally characterised by the pronunciation of the vowel e as an open-mid front unrounded vowel or [ɛ]. This is pronounced similarly to English bed.

In the southern group of subdialects, the letter e has two pronunciations. In words of Spanish and foreign origin, it is pronounced [ɛ] as in the northern dialect. In native Ilokano words, however, e is pronounced as a close back unrounded vowel or [ɯ]. This sound is found in many Philippine languages like Kinaray-a as well as non-Philippine languages such as Japanese, and Turkish.

[edit] Geographic distribution

Ilokanos occupy the narrow, barren strip of land in the northwestern tip of Luzon, squeezed in between the inhospitable Cordillera mountain range to the east and the South China Sea to the west. This harsh geography molded a people known for their clannishness, tenacious industry and frugality, traits that were vital for survival. It also induced Ilokanos to become a migratory people, always in search for better opportunities and for land to build a life on. Although their homeland constitutes the provinces of Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union and Abra, their population has spread east and south of their original territorial borders.

Ilokano pioneers flocked to the more fertile Cagayan Valley, Apayao mountains and the Pangasinan plains during the 18th and 19th centuries and now constitute a majority in many of these areas. In the 20th century, many Ilokano families moved further south to Mindanao. They became the first Filipino ethnic group to immigrate en masse to North America (the so-called Manong generation), forming sizable communities in the American states of Hawaii, California, Washington and Alaska. Ilokano is the native language of most of the original Filipino immigrants in the United States, but Tagalog is used by more Filipino-Americans because it is the national language of the people of the Philippines.

A large, growing number of Ilokanos can also be found in the Middle East, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Canada and Europe.

[edit] Writing system

[edit] Pre-Colonial

Pre-colonial Ilokanos of all classes wrote in a syllabic system prior to European arrival. They used a system that is termed as an abugida, or an alphasyllabary. It was similar to the Tagalog and Pangasinan scripts, where each character represented a consonant-vowel, or CV, sequence. The Ilokano version, however, was the first to designate coda consonants with a diacritic mark - a cross virama, shown in the Doctrina Cristiana of 1621, one of the earliest surviving Ilokano publications. Before the addition of the virama, writers had no way to designate coda consonants. The reader, on the other hand, had to guess whether the vowel was read or not.

[edit] Colonial

After the advent of the Spanish to the islands, the syllabary was abandoned in favor of the Spanish (Castilian) version of the Latin alphabet.

[edit] Modern

Recently, there are two systems in use: The "Spanish" system and the "Tagalog" system. In the Spanish system words of Spanish origin kept their spellings. Native words, on the other hand, conformed to the Spanish rules of spelling. Nowadays, only the older generation of Ilokanos use the Spanish system.

The system based on that of Tagalog is more phonetic. In this system each letter receives one phonetic value, and better reflects the actual pronunciation of the word.^[1] The letters ng, however, constitute a digraph and follows the letter n in alphabetization. As a result, numo humility appears before ngalngal to chew in newer dictionaries. Words of foreign origin, most notably those from Spanish, need to be changed in spelling to better reflect Ilokano phonology. The weekly magazine Bannawag is known to use this system.

[edit] System Comparison

System Comparison

Comments	Spanish	Ilokano	Gloss
c -> k	tucac	tukak	frog
ck -> kk	dackel	dakkel	big
ci, ce -> si, se	acero	asero	steel
ch -> ts	coche	kotse	car
f -> p [2]	familia	pamilia	family
gui, gue -> gi, ge	daguiti	dagiti	the (plural)
ge, gi -> he, hi [3]	página	pahina	page
h -> 0	horas	oras	hour
j -> h [3]	juez	hues	judge
ll -> li	caballo	kabalio	horse
ñ -> ni	baño	banio	bath/bathroom
ñg -> ng	ngioat	ngiwat	mouth
Vo(V) -> Vw(V)	aoan aldao	awan aldaw	there are no/there is no/not have day
qui, que -> ki, ke	iquit	ikit	aunt
v -> b	voces	boses	voice
z -> s	zapatos	sapatos	shoe

[edit] Literature

Main article: Ilokano literature

Ilokano animistic past offers a rich background in folklore, mythology and superstition (see Religion in the Philippines). There are many stories of good and malevolent spirits and beings. Its creation mythology centers on the giants Aran and her husband Angngalo, and Namarsua (the Creator).

The epic story Biag ni Lam-ang (The Life of Lam-ang) is undoubtedly one of the few indigenous stories from the Philippines that survived colonialism, although much of it is now acculturated and shows many foreign elements in the retelling. It reflects values important to traditional Ilokano society; it is a hero’s journey steeped in courage, loyalty, pragmatism, honor, and ancestral and familial bonds.

Ilokano culture revolves around life rituals, festivities and oral history. These were celebrated in songs, dances, poems, riddles, proverbs, literary verbal jousts called bucanegan and epic stories.

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Segemental

[edit] Vowels

Modern Ilokano has a five-vowel system in the North and six-vowel system in the South.

• North: /a/, /i/, /u/,/ɛ/,/o/
• South: /a/, /i/, /u/,/ɛ/,/o/,/ɯ/

The letter in bold is the graphic (written) representation of the vowel.

Ilokano Vowel Chart

Height	Front	Central	Back
Close	i /i/		e /ɯ/, u/o /u/
Mid	e /ɛ/		o /o/
Open		a /a/

For a better redition of vowel distribution, please refer to the IPA Vowel Chart.

Although the modern (Tagalog) writing system is largely phonetic, there are some notable conventions.

In native morphemes, the close back rounded vowel /u/ is written differently depending on the syllable. If the vowel occurs in the ultima of the morpheme, it is written o; elsewhere, u.

Example:
    Root: luto cook
          agluto to cook
          lutuen to cook (something)

Instances such as kitaekonto, I will take a look at it, are still consistent. Note that kitaekonto is, in fact, three morphemes: kitae(n) (verb base) , ko (pronoun) and (n)to (future particle). An exception to this rule, however, is laud /la.ʔud/, west.

That said, the two vowels are not highly differentiated in native words, due to fact that /o/ was a allophone of /u/ in the history of the language. In words of foreign origin, notably Spanish, they are phonemic.

Example:
    uso use
    oso bear

The two close vowels become glides when followed by another vowel. The close back rounded vowel /u/ becomes [w] before another vowel. The close front unrounded vowel /i/ and becomes the glide [j] before another vowel.

Example:
    kuarta /kwar.ta/ money
    paria /par.ya/ bitter melon

In addition, dental/alveolar consonants become palatalized before /i/. (See Consonants below).

The letter e represent two vowels in the Southern dialect, /ɛ/ in words of foreign origin and /ɯ/ in native words, and only one in the Northern dialect, /ɛ/.

Realization of 'e'

Word	Gloss	Origin	Northern Dialect	Southern Dialect
keddeng	assign	Native	kɛd.dɛŋ	kɯd.dɯŋ
elepante	elephant	Spanish	ʔɛ.lɛ.pan.tɛ	ʔɛ.lɛ.pan.tɛ

[edit] Diphthongs