“Liminality” as an Identifying Feature of Bantayanon Grammar

Philippine Indigenous Languages Lecture Series (PILLS)
31 January | Friday | 1:00 PM
CSSP Health & Wellness Center

The opening installment of the 2025 Philippine Indigenous Languages Lecture Series (PILLS) will be on Bantayanon [bfx], a language spoken on the Bantayan island in Cebu and surrounding islands.

ABSTRACT
Bantayanon (ISO 639-3 [bfx]) is a language that is not too well known outside of its home Island of Bantayan in the Province of Cebu. That may be because the language has been and perhaps continues to be confused with Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and the other languages spoken on the island and this multilingual nature of the Bantayanon and tendency to switch to Cebuano has resulted in some speakers describing their speech as saksak-sinagol ‘hodgepodge.’ While Bantayanon is and should be considered a distinct language, I attempt to show in this lecture that the boundaries between Bantayanon and the other languages of Bantayan are not discrete and that this “liminality” or in-betweenness is the identifying and distinguishing feature of Bantayanon grammar. To demonstrate this, I will look at three examples of liminality in the language’s grammar including the varying realizations of the lateral consonant /l/, the dichotomy between the markers =y and sing, and the synonymity of lat, pod, and sad ‘also.’ I will also attempt to explore some of the possible functionalities of this liminality in linguistic accommodation, identity establishment, and boundary-making and their implications in the further study of Bantayanon and other similar languages as indiscrete yet distinct grammatical systems.