Agta, Mt. Iriga
Agta, Mt. Iriga [agz], with alternate names Rinconada Agta; Agta, Lake Buhi West; Mount Iriga Negrito; and San Ramon Inagta, is a Central Philippine language spoken by communities in three southern towns of Camarines Sur. Speakers of the language are generally found along the forest zones of Baao, Buhi, and Iriga, although present-day settlements are mostly located in Sitio Ilian in San Nicolas, Iriga (Lobel, 2013). According to the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), the language has around 1,500 speakers in 1979 (as cited in Eberhard et al., 2022), and it is classified as threatened (EGIDS 6b*).
Language contact
The lexicon of Agta, Mt. Iriga has loans from southern Bikol languages such as Rinconada Bikol. This is probably due to the fact that its speakers, like other Agta peoples, usually interact with and work for users of the dominant languages. They are employed as manual laborers and household helpers (Lobel, 2013).
Works about Agta, Mt. Iriga
Drafts of two wordlists are available on the online archives of SIL International. The first one is elicited from Santa Niño near Buhi and compiled by Nickell (1979), while the other features Agta, Mt. Iriga along with three other Bikol languages (1984).
References
Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2022). Agta, Mt. Iriga. Ethnologue: Languages of the world(25th ed.). https://www.ethnologue.com/language/agz
Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M., & Bank, S. (Eds.). (2022). Spoken L1 language: Mt. Iriga Agta. Glottolog 4.6. https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/mtir1235
Lobel, J. W. (2013). Philippine and North Bornean languages: Issues in description, subgrouping, and reconstruction[Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa]. ScholarSpace. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/101972
Nickell, T. L. (1979). Agta – Sta Niño-Sta Cruz + Ipil, 1979 wordlist [Draft]. https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/76893
SIL International. (1984). Bicol survey wordlist [Draft]. https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/76697