Philippine Hokkien: Then and Now

Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) 2025 No. 1
05 March | Wednesday | 1:00 PM
CSSP Health and Wellness Center

The Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) features talks by invited experts on various topics under the fields of theoretical and applied linguistics.

For the first installment of LSLS 2025, UP Diliman BA Lingg alum, and now doctoral researcher in Asian studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, John Oliver Monghit, will give a talk on Philippine Hokkien.

ABSTRACT

This presentation discusses the evolution of Philippine Hokkien, the language of the majority of Filipino-Chinese. The Philippines and China share a long history of trade and commerce, and a number of Chinese traders (called Sangleyes) settled in the archipelago. During the Spanish colonial period, missionaries learned their language to facilitate evangelization, which resulted in the creation of philological materials such as grammars and dictionaries for Philippine Hokkien. The content of these sources will be compared to Proto-Southern Min reconstructed by Kwok (2018) and modern Philippine Hokkien data. Through this approach, how the Hokkien language in the Philippines has developed is presented, and which features (especially phonological) have changed are enumerated. On another note, a few Hokkien loanwords in Tagalog have been revisited and reassessed.

BIONOTE

John Oliver Monghit is a doctoral researcher in Asian Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He obtained a BA in linguistics at the University of the Philippines Diliman and an MA in Chinese language and literature at Hanyang University. Throughout his academic career, he was awarded fully funded scholarships by the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC), the National Institute for International Education (NIIED-GKS), and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He has previously worked on Tagalog dialectology, grammaticalization, and Sino-Korean phonology, while his current research focuses on Philippine Hokkien.