THE ESKAYAN LANGUAGE OF BOHOL: THE YOUNGEST AND MOST ANCIENT IN THE PHILIPPINES
Linguistics Special Lecture Series 2022 No.2
presented in cooperation with The Katig Collective

 

Piers Kelly
Research Fellow
Faculty of Humanities, Arts, social Sciences and Education
University of New England

 

27 October 2022 | Thursday | 03:00 PM Philippine Time (UTC+08:00)

 

The lecture will be livestreamed on
Facebook Live: UP Department of Linguistics
Youtube: http://bit.ly/UPLinguisticsYT

 

ABSTRACT

The Eskaya people of Bohol have long been a source of fascination and controversy for their unusual language, complex writing system, and unique cultural practices. First ‘discovered’ by outsiders in 1980, the Eskaya were perceived as a lost tribe that had successfully resisted Spanish, American and Japanese colonizers. As such they offered a vision of an uncorrupted Filipino society, with its own independent traditions of language, literature and statehood. But the Eskayan language—spoken today in narrow domains by about 550 people—adds a complicating dimension to this appealing narrative. Speakers maintain that Eskayan is not a natural Philippine language but was instead the independent creation of a heroic ancestor. In their belief, the language was lost under Spanish rule but successfully revived in the 20th century. An analysis of its grammar and lexicon corroborates key aspects of this account: Eskayan phonology and morphosyntax is modeled on Boholano-Visayan while its lexicon takes inspiration from Visayan, Spanish and English. Its elaborate and surprising script of over 1000 signs is partly derived from the Roman alphabet but with some functional similarities to the Philippine Script (baybayin). I will explore the special historical circumstances that prompted the intentional creation of the language and script, describe the rich Eskaya literary tradition, and explain why this unlikely language has continued to be spoken and written for over a century.

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Piers Kelly is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of New England, Australia, whose research centers on creative extensions to ordinary language-use,  especially through writing and graphic codes. He has previously worked as a linguist with the National Commission on Indigenous People, Philippines, and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. His book on the history of the Eskayan language and script is The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines (Oxford, 2022).

 

Moderator:

Asst. Prof. Divine Angeli P. Endriga