A Grammatical Sketch of Porohanon

This study aims to describe the phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic structures of Porohanon, a Bisayan language spoken in the Municipality of Poro, Camotes Islands, Cebu, Philippines. Since John Wolff’s 1967 article History of the dialect of the Camotes Islands, Philippines and the spread of Cebuano Bisayan, a full grammatical description of Porohanon has not been undertaken, despite consistent reference to Porohanon in the literature on the subgrouping of Bisayan lects (Zorc, 1977; Lobel, 2006; Blust, 2013) and various studies tackling only portions of its grammar, and geographic distribution (Carcellar,
1976; Ballo, 2011; Esmero, et al., 2018; Garrido, 2020).

Based on primary recorded linguistic data, interviews, and participant observation from fieldwork in the municipality during the years 2018 and 2022, this grammatical sketch adopts two general approaches. Individual speech sounds, their features, possible patterns of combination, and how they change over short and long periods of time are analyzed using the notational conventions and concepts of classic generative phonology (Chomsky & Halle, 1968). Atomic constructions (e.g., Affixes, Articles, Content Words, etc.) and complex constructions (e.g.,
Referential Expressions, Phrases, Sentences) are analyzed using concepts from Radical Construction Grammar (Croft, 2001).

What emerges is an updated description of Porohanon; enriched with more data and situated in the contemporary linguistic ecology of the Camotes Islands in the years 2022–2023. Standard Cebuano influence is heavier than before, most notably in the Articles, Pronominals, and some Function Words and Content Words. Despite this, most language users affirm the distinctiveness of Porohanon and its role as a marker of membership in an island community of the Central Visayas