University of the Philippines Diliman | College of Social Sciences and Philosophy

Bogkalot

Bogkalot [ilk] is a threatened language (EGIDS 6b) spoken in Cagayan Valley, specifically in the south of Nueva Vizcaya and in Nagtipunan, Quirino. According to the 2010 census, it has 5,710 speakers. Bogkalot is continuously losing speakers in more than half of the villages in Quirino and Nueva Vizcaya (Gonzales, 2016, as cited in Eberhard et al., 2022), and many Bogkalot speakers who are married to Ilocano speakers prefer to use Ilocano [ilo] as the home language (Zubiri, 2019, as cited in Eberhard et al., 2022). Bogkalot speakers in Nueva Vizcaya who live near Tagalog-speaking provinces prefer to speak Tagalog [tgl], while those in Quirino who reside near Ilocano-speaking provinces prefer to speak Ilocano.

Few resources on Bogkalot are available today. Two books that explore Ilongot (another term for Bogkalot) culture were published in 1980. Michelle Rosaldo’s Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self & Social Life presents an ethnography of Ilongot life and explains social practices such as headhunting, oratory, marriage, and the organization of subsistence labor. Renato Rosaldo’s Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History, on the other hand, chronicles the history of headhunting by compiling extended oral histories and written records. Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) lists several works that focus on the language, the majority of which are wordlists compiled by Thomas L. Nickell.

References

Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2022). Bogkalot. Ethnologue: Languages of the world (25th ed.). https://www.ethnologue.com/language/ilk

Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M., & Bank, S. (Eds.). (2022). Spoken L1 language: Ilongot. Glottolog 4.6. https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/ilon1239

Open Language Archives Community. (n.d.). OLAC resources in and about the Ilongot language. http://www.language-archives.org/language/ilk

Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980). Knowledge and passion: Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge University Press.

Rosaldo, R. (1980). Ilongot headhunting, 1883-1974: A study in society and history. Stanford University Press.