Inst. Brian Baran will present his paper, “Some Preliminary Notes on the Linguistic Variation and Orthographic Practices among the Multilingual Lawisanon of Bantayan Island,” at the Annual Conference for the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia (ARWA 2025), held at Cebu from 27 to 28 February.
The conference aims to “provide an interactive platform for academics, researchers, and students to share their insights and experience on research related to reading and writing” through “presentations across the spectrum of literacy development, literacy impairment, and expert linguistic processing in Asia from related fields such as psychology, education, linguistics and neuroscience.”
Below is the paper’s abstract:
Some Preliminary Notes on the Linguistic Variation and Orthographic Practices among the Multilingual Lawisanon of Bantayan Island
The Municipality of Madridejos or Lawis on Bantayan Island is home to the Lawisanon. While the indigenous language of Bantayan Island is the endangered Bantayanon language (ISO 639-3 [bfx]), the Lawisanon are multilingual and speak, code-switch, and code-mix in Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Minasbate, Filipino/Tagalog, and English. Some Lawisanon even characterize their speech, the Linawis variety of Bantayanon, as a saksak-sinagol ‘hodgepodge’ speech of the different languages spoken on the island. This multilingual context is particularly reflected in the presence of pervasive variation in Linawis, and this variation is most observable in the phonological variation involving the lateral consonant /l/. The Lawisanon may retain (/l/ > [l]), vocalize (/l/ > [j]), or delete (/l/ > Ø) the lateral consonant and their choices have visible effects on their orthographic practices. This study attempts to make a preliminary account of the orthographic practices of a highly multilingual community based on initial fieldwork observations and data collection during the linguistic documentation of the previously undocumented Linawis variety of Bantayanon. In personal communication and in signages, phonological variants are orthographically differentiated, e.g., dya [ˈd̪ʒjʌ] vs. da [ˈd̪ɑː] vs. dala [d̪ʌ.ˈlʌ] ‘to bring’, but in some toponyms—particularly the Barangays of Talangnan and Maalat—phonological variants may not be orthographically differentiated but may still be realized differently, e.g., Talangnan being realized as both [ˈt̪ʃjʌŋ.n̪ʌn̪] and [t̪ʌ.ˈlʌŋ.n̪ʌn̪]. These examples provide insight into how a highly multilingual community addresses linguistic variation in orthography and provides additional perspective into the current proposals for a Bantayanon orthography. Furthermore, the examples have significant implications in developing pedagogical materials in a multilingual community where variation is not the exception but the norm.
More information about the conference may be read on its official website.
Published by UP Department of Linguistics
