Chabacano/Spanish and the Philippine linguistic identity

John M. Lipski
The Pennsylvania State University
0. Introduction

In the linguistic profile of the Philippines, one of the most elusive elements to categorize
and acknowledge the Spanish contribution. The amount of Spanish lexical incursions into the
major Philippine language families is beyond dispute; less well understood is the extent to which
the Spanish language is actively used and understood throughout the nation. Finally, and most
germane to the topic of this symposium, is the inclusion, classification, and appreciation of a
group of languages known to linguists as Philippine Creole Spanish, and to the speech
communties themselves as Chabacano. Like many other creole languages, the name Chabacano
itself stems from a derisive Spanish term meaning clumsy, ill-formed, and vulgar. Although
within the PCS/Chabacano-speaking communities this word has lost the negative connotation
and refers only to the language itself, many enlightened community members avoid the term
Chabacano and prefer instead the regional designations of Caviteño, Ternateño, and especially
Zamboangueño. Throughout the history of the Philippines Chabacano in its various
manifestations has remained at the margins of the country's linguistic repertoire, ignored by
many, repudiated by those who aware of its existence (this even includes many speech
community members), ambiguously classified by Philippine language typologists, and truly
appreciated only by the elite subset of professional linguists who specialize in creole languages.
Even among this group the creole status of PCS is not undisputed, all of which combines to make
PCS/Chabacano a linguistic orphan surrounded by patrimonial languages and the unchallenged
carryovers of colonial times.1
The reasons for the low profile of Chabacano in the Philippine linguistic consciousness
are many, the most salient of which include:
(1) General unawareness of a language which nowadays is spoken extensively only in a
geographically remote portion of the country, Zamboanga City and surrounding parts of
Zamboanga del Sur province, as well as in other pockets in Mindanao and the islands of Basilan
and Jolo. Philippine Creole Spanish dialects were once spoken more extensively in the Ermita
district of Manila as well as in other enclaves on Manila Bay (Cavite and Ternate), but most non-
speakers of Manila Bay Chabacano who were even aware that some Spanish-derived language
was spoken in their midst assumed that this was some form of Spanish, possibly a broken
second-language variety or pidgin.
(2) Among those Filipinos with second-hand knowledge of Chabacano, the notion that
this is in reality a dialect of Spanish, a colonial language increasingly marginalized in Philippine
society. In the contemporary Philippines, fluency in Spanish is generally restricted to a small
and aging elite of mixed Philippine-Spanish heritage; the typical fluent Spanish speaker has at
least one parent or grandparent born in Spain, and belongs to wealthy landowning or empresarial
classes far-removed from the grass-roots level at which Chabacano is spoken. In Zamboanga,
recent reintroductions of Spanish items (Lipski 1986a, 1987f) contribute to the mistaken notion
that Zamboangueño Chabacano has been Spanish `all along,’ with only occasional deviations
from standard usage.
(3) The mistaken notion among creolists (beginning with Whinnom 1956) that the largest
Chabacano-speaking population, that of Zamboanga City, is small and moribund, when in fact it
is a thriving first- and second-language speech community of perhaps half a million speakers.
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Frake (1971) was the first to provide more accurate information on Zamboangueño, but to this
day many scholars in the Philippines and abroad are unaware of the true strength of the
Zamboanga Chabacano community.
(4) The fact that in the majority of surveys of Philippine languages (especially those
produced within the Philippines, e.g. Llamzon 1978), none of the Chabacano varieties appears
(at times `Spanish’ is listed), thus implicitly suggesting that Chabacano is not a `Philippine'
language.
(5) The historical confusion, found in literature, travelers’ accounts, and official
documents, between Philippine varieties of Spanish, rudimentary Spanish-based pidgins and
trade languages, and Spanish-derived creoles spoken natively by Filipinos.
(6) The small number of native Spanish speakers in the Philippines has contributed to the
lack of studies of contemporary Philippine Spanish; the majority of works which lay claim to
such a description in reality deal with Hispanic lexical items in native Philippine languages, or
with some aspect of the PCS dialects. At times, the latter dialects are mistakenly referred to as
"Philippine Spanish," as though there were no legitimate non-creolized variant of metropolitan
Spanish currently available in the Philippines. One example of this confusion is the statement
(Diez, Morales, Sabin 1977:85) that `En la actualidad la situación del español es bastante
precaria ... el dialecto español que se habla en aquellas islas recibe el nombre de chabacano’
[currently, Spanish is in a precarious situation in the Philippines ... the Spanish dialect spoken in
that country is known as Chabacano]. Quilis (1975:34) speaks of ...el español como dialecto
conservado en Cavite y Zamboanga ... este dialecto es el que se conoce con el nombre de
chabacano. Su estructura es bastante peculiar: es un español con los recursos gramaticales del
tagalo y del cebuano ... [Spanish as a dialect conserved in Cavite and Zamboanga ... this is the
dialect known as Chabacano. It has a peculiar structure: it is Spanish with the grammatical
resources of Tagalog and Cebuano]. In later writings Quilis clearly recognized Chabacano as a
creole language and not simply a `mixed dialect' of Spanish. A more serious assessment
(Whinnom 1956:2) states that `the modern Spanish of Manila has none of the characteristics of
the South American or Andalusian Spanish ... the Philippine Spanish of today is the result of the
second stage of the Spanish contact with the Philippines.’ National census data representing
both the American administration and the Philippine national government provide confusing
information, since PCS or Chabacano dialects are lumped together with modern Spanish, while
there is a tendency to overlook potential Spanish speakers who have no formal training in that
language. As a timely note, the web page provided by the Shangri-La hotels in the Philippines
gives a description of Zamboanga which states `The dialect spoken there is a corruption of the
Spanish language.’

1. The Chabacano presence in the Philippines

The Philippines is the only former Spanish where the Spanish language was never
acquired by the majority of the native population, and which replaced no native language.
Among the other former colonies, only Equatorial Guinea shows a similar profile, but this colony
was not effectively occupied by Spain until the 1860's (Fernando Poo) or the first decades of the
20th century (Río Muni), with the total period under Spanish colonial rule being no more than
60-100 years. Even so, the majority of the population speaks Spanish, albeit as a second
language with varying levels of ability (Lipski 1985). In the Philippines, a very small and
rapidly dwindling population—mostly recent descendents of Spaniards—speaks Spanish
fluently; this group has little or no linguistic impact on the rest of the national population. In
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addition, several Spanish-derived creoles continue to be spoken natively; the largest community
is found in Zamboanga City, with expatriate Zamboangueño enclaves in Cotabato, Jolo, and
Davao. Along Manila Bay, vestigial speakers of Cavite and Ternate Chabacano are still to be
found, while the once thriving Ermita variety of Manila has now disappeared.
Collectively, all varieties of Philippine Creole Spanish (PCS) are known as Chabacano,
and three distinct dialects still exist, in Ternate, Cavite and Zamboanga. Whinnom postulated
that Ternateño (T) was the first to be formed, suggesting that this creole has extraterritorial roots,
descending from a largely Portuguese-based creole formed in the 17th century on the Indonesian
island of the same name. Comparative work by Molony (1973, 1977a, 1977b) supports the
hypothesis that T is the oldest of the Spanish-based creoles in the Philippines while observations
by Batalha (1960) suggest more than casual parallels with some Asian Portuguese-based creoles.
Caviteño (C) was a later offshoot of T, one of many stable or fleeting Spanish-based contact
vernaculars that arose in the fortified areas around Manila Bay, and it too can be traced back at
least as far as the 18th century. T and C exhibit several grammatical features that make them
contenders for being descendents or relexifications of earlier Portuguese-based creoles and
pidgins (but cf. Lipski 1988). Both creoles have been influenced by Philippine languages,
particularly Tagalog; this is evident not only in the preferred VSO word order (at least with
pronominal subjects), but also in the incorporation of Tagalog particles and other syntactic
structures. Varieties of PCS are also spoken on the island of Mindanao. The largest group of
speakers is found in and around Zamboanga City. A small group, now largely dispersed and
speaking central Philippine languages, previously existed in Davao, derived from immigrants
from Zamboanga who arrived at the turn of the 20th century. Another small group is found in
Cotabato City (Riego de Dios 1976a, 1978). Cotabatateño (Ct) is virtually identical to
Zamboangueño (Z), with the few differences being mostly lexical. Riego de Dios suggests that
the two dialects may have partially different roots, although admitting immigration from
Zamboanga to Cotabato as the likely source of most of Ct.
Although unknown to or ignored by most Filipinos, the Chabacano dialects are of
importance to creolists. Philippine Creole Spanish is the only Spanish-based creole in Asia,
fitting in with the Portuguese-based creoles in India, Sri Lanka, Malacca and Macau; indeed,
some (beginning with Whinnom 1956; cf. Lipski 1988 for differing views) assert that Philippine
Creole Spanish is but a relexification of a pan-Asian Portuguese-based creole. All other
Spanish-based creoles (Papiamentu, Afro-Colombian Palenquero, and vestigial enclaves found in
Latin America) result from Afro-Hispanic language contacts, although some Hispano-
Amerindian creoles may have existed in small numbers, and the possibility for a Hispano-Arabic
creole as part of Mozarabic language cannot be totally discounted. Philippine creole Spanish is
also important for theories of creole language typology. It breaks from the usual SVO patterns,
in exhibiting a prototypically Austronesian VSO, albeit with many alternative possibilities. The
verbal syntax is both tantalizingly similar and vastly different from other Iberian-based creoles,
and many other unique features accrue to PCS. In order to assess the situation of Chabacano in
the pantheon of Philippine languages, it is necessary to survey the nature and distribution of non-
creole Spanish in the Philippines, since the most frequent misidentification responsible for the
marginality of Chabacano awareness is the equation Chabacano = Spanish in the Philippines.

2. The Spanish language in the Philippines

The failure of the Spanish language to establish itself in the Philippines has been the
subject of much prior commentary; suffice it to say that this linguistic situation stems from a
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combination of factors, among which are: the Spanish government's official and non-official
policy of using the vernacular languages, particularly in religious functions; the relatively small
number of Spanish natives in comparison with the indigeneous Philippine population; the lack of
significant demographic shifts among native groups in the Philippines which would have
precipitated the necessary use of Spanish as a lingua franca. With the exception of the
Chabacano dialects, which arose around Spanish military garrisons and spread in multilingual
commercial centers, Spanish never became the native language of any large sector of the
native-born Filipino population, nor even became a widely used lingua franca outside of those
(mestizo) groups most closely aligned with the colonial administration. With the coming of the
American administration and the rapid and effective implementation of educational programs in
English, Spanish was pushed ever further into the background, and its status as an obligatory part
of the school curriculum is currently being called into question, as an apparent anachronism.
Currently, the majority of Spanish-speaking Filipinos belong to mestizo (Eurasian) families,
directly descended from Spanish settlers. Moreover, this Spanish parentage is usually quite
recent, in that nearly all Spanish speakers have at least one grandparent who was born in Spain;
few Spanish speakers are found who cannot claim a Spanish-born relative at least two
generations in the past. This Spanish-speaking nucleus is strengthened by intermarriage, since
most Spanish speakers have married other Spanish speakers or have otherwise reinforced their
Spanish language environment, including membership in clubs or in the Casino Español (in
Manila and Cebu), trips to Spain, and choice of residential area.
It is also possible to find non-mestizo Filipinos who for one reason or another learned
Spanish through contact with previous generations of Spanish speakers, but the number of such
individuals is small in comparison with the totality of Philippine Spanish speakers. Spanish is
still a subject in the university curriculum (despite current pressure to remove the requirement),
and formerly Spanish was widely taught in the public schools. Although the majority of
Filipinos who have studied Spanish under such circumstances have very little useful language
ability, many individuals have a degree of passive competence which allows them to grasp the
general meaning of Spanish phrases and expressions. Naturally, the high proportion of
Hispanisms in the native Philippine languages aids in the recognition of current Spanish forms,
and older Filipinos may recall the presence of Spanish priests, nuns and lay teachers, particularly
in private schools, all of whom helped spread an awareness of the Spanish language. Lawyers in
the Philippines have often studied Spanish more carefully, since much of the legal code was
written in Spanish, and until relatively recently it was possible to use the Spanish language in the
courtroom. Many Filipina nuns studied in convents directed by Spanish priests and nuns, where
Spanish was the language of daily communication, and even today they may recall some aspects
of that language. It thus becomes clear that, while the majority of true Spanish speakers come
from mestizo families, there is an undetermined but not inconsiderable number of Filipinos with
some knowledge of Spanish, below the level of native speakers but superior to that of foreign
students.
A concomitant feature of most Philippine Spanish speakers is their socioeconomic level,
which is usually toward the top of the scale. Spanish speakers are frequently members of
Spanish landowning and commercial families, which have managed to retain and even expand
their fortunes throughout the various post-colonial administrations in the Philippines. Naturally,
not all such families have retained their wealth and social position, and there are other
Spanish-speaking families which clearly belong to the middle classes, but among the wealthier
Spanish speakers, use of the language is regarded as a source of pride and an unmistakable mark
 5

of aristocratic authenticity. These Spanish speakers continue to use the language at home,
although it is difficult to use Spanish in public, due to general lack of interlocutors and a certain
resentment among other Filipinos. Despite efforts of Spanish speakers to teach the language to
their children, few true Spanish speakers under the age of about 40 are to be found, and it is
unlikely that the language will survive another generation. Most Philippine Spanish speakers are
also proficient in English, but few hold native Philippine languages in high esteem, often
regarding with resentment and scorn the establishment of Tagalog (Pilipino) as a national
language. As a result of these attitudes and behavior patterns, Philippine Spanish is
characteristically refined, aristocratic, precise, and linguistically conservative, with none of the
popular, regional and rural forms which are essential ingredients of the PCS dialects, and which
are widespread in the Spanish dialects of Latin America. Also of note are the distinctly Castilian
(i.e. central and northern Spain) traits of contemporary Philippine Spanish, where virtually no
hint of Andalusian, Galician, Canary Island, Catalan, Valencian, or other regional features of
vocabulary or pronunciation are found, despite the fact that many of the last wave of Spanish
immigrants to the Philippines came from those regions. The highly precise and Castilianized
Philippine Spanish reflects the influence of Spanish teachers, administrative personnel and
religious figures, as well as literary and journalistic standards which were in wide usage until
well after World War II, among the numerous newspapers, magazines and other documents
published in Spanish.
Currently, the largest number of Spanish-speaking Filipinos is found in metropolitan
Manila, although significant smaller groups are located in many provincial capitals, particularly
in those regions characterized by large plantations and estates which have existed since the
Spanish period. Among the latter zones are the sugar-producing regions of Negros (particularly
in Bacolod but also around Dumaguete) and the fruit-producing regions of Mindanao, especially
around Cagayan de Oro and Davao. Other nuclei of Spanish speakers are found in the Bikol area
(Legaspi City and Naga), Iloilo, Tacloban, Cotabato, Vigan, Cebu and Zamboanga, being in the
latter case bilectal Spanish-Chabacano speakers. Although the totality of the regions mentioned
above represents a wide selection of regional languages, including Tagalog, Ilocano, Hiligaynon,
Cebuano/Visayan, Waray, etc., there has been virtually no regionalized influence of these
languages on Philippine Spanish, in that it is in general impossible to distinguish the
geographical origin of a Spanish-speaking Filipino through features of spoken Spanish (unlike
the case with spoken English).
The specific linguistic features of Philippine Spanish are of interest to the present
enterprise only to the extent that they intersect with Chabacano and reflect the integration of both
languages into a pan-Philippine linguistic matrix (Lipski 1987c, 1987d, 1987e). Phonetically,
Philippine Spanish differs from other natively-spoken varieties in maintaining a uniformly
occlusive pronunciation of intervocalic /b/, /d/, and /g/, which are fricatives in other Spanish
dialects. This is especially noticeable in the case of intervocalic /d/, which may even overlap
with the [r] articulation of /r/ in the Philippines, particularly when /d/ is given an alveolar
articulation instead of the more universal dental pronunciation. Few current Philippine Spanish
speakers utilize the fricative pronunciation of intervocalic and word-final /d/; those that do
usually have at least one parent born in Spain, or have spent considerable time in that country.
This same trait has been carried over to the PCS dialects and to Hispanisms borrowed into native
Philippine languages; an identical pronunciation is found among Spanish speakers in Equatorial
Guinea, the only Spanish-speaking region of sub-Saharan Africa, and among bilingual
indigeneous-Spanish speakers in many regions of Latin America. As an alternative to an
 6

occlusive articulatioin, intervocalic /d/ is frequently elided, particularly in the verbal affix -ado,
used to form past participles, following the patterns current in peninsular Spanish dialects.
Unlike the dialects of Spain, and like those of Africa and bilingual areas of Latin America,
Philippine Spanish intervocalic /d/ never passes through the fricative stage en route to deletion;
the loss of /d/ is an imitation of an originally phonetically-motivated process, but there is no
active reduction of /d/ among new words introduced into Philippine Spanish, or in other
intervocalic contexts which in other Spanish dialects are also being gradually affected by the
reduction process.
In other respects, Philippine Spanish retains a strongly resistant syllable-final /s/, unlike
the Andalusian dialects that apparently provided the input to Manila Bay Chabacano dialects and
most probably Zamboangueño as well (Lipski 1986b, 1987a). Word-final /n/ receives a
uniformly alveolar articulation [n] in Philippine Spanish, despite the high frequency of
word-final velar [ ] among the native Philippine languages, and the strong tendency to velarize
word-final /n/ in the Spanish dialects of Andalusia, Galicia and other areas of Spain whence
came many immigrants. Many Philippine Spanish speakers use the palatal lateral phoneme /ë/,
characteristic of an ever smaller group of Peninsular Spanish dialects, but once prominent among
varieties of Spanish taken to the Philippines. At times, /ë/ is realized as [ly] among the last
generation of Philippine Spanish speakers, but merger with /y/, as has occurred in most dialects
of Spain and Latin America, is extremely rare, and occurs only as an idiosyncratic trait. Unlike
any dialect of Latin American Spanish or of PCS, contemporary Philippine Spanish exhibits the
voiceless dental fricative phoneme /è/ (written z or, before e and i, as c), used in accordance with
Spanish etymology and the norms of contemporary Castilian speech, although occasional
discrepancies are observable.
Another outstanding characteristic of Philippine Spanish is the frequency of the glottal
stop [q] at the beginning of words which nominally begin with a vowel: el hombre [el-qom-bre]
`the man.' This is contrary to the normal Spanish phonotactic linking of word-final consonants
to syllable-initial position if the following word begins with a vowel; in other Spanish dialects,
the corresponding pronunciation would be [e-lom-bre]. The glottal occlusion [q] is also heard in
some hiatus combinations, such as maíz [ma-qis] `corn,' the same pronunciation as is used
among the native Philippine languages. Due to the extraordinary use of [q], the normal
consonantal linking typical of Spanish phonetics does not as frequently occur in Philippine
Spanish, with the result that phonetic boundaries between words are clearly perceivable in the
spoken chain. This feature, evidently the result of influence from native Philippine languages, is
found in the speech of nearly all contemporary Philippine Spanish speakers, regardless of their
claimed or actual proficiency in Philippine languages; it is possible, however, that earlier
generations of Spanish speakers, many of whom were nearly monolingual, may not have
exhibited this trait, which is not found in any peninsular Spanish dialect.
In the morphosyntactic domain, fluent Philippine Spanish exhibits no deviations from
other natively-spoken dialects. The second person familiar pronoun vosotros is used as in much
of Spain, and le/les are used as direct object clitics, again following Peninsular usage. Lexically,
there are few peculiarities. The number of indigeneous borrowings into Philippine Spanish is
quite low, and is limited almost entirely to the flora and fauna which have no equivalent
expression in Spanish, and to the formation of nicknames via the suffix -ng: Pedring (Pedro),
Doming (Dominador), Carling (Carlos), Puring (Purificación), etc. In a few cases, a Tagalog
root is combined with a Spanish morphological suffix, as in babaero/babayero `woman-chaser,'
from Tagalog babae `woman.' Among the last generation of Philippine Spanish speakers, the
 7

use of the Philippine oo [oqo] instead of or in addition to the Spanish affirmative particle sí is
relatively frequent, particularly in unguarded moments of reflection; presumably this did not
occur among earlier generations of essentially monolingual Spanish speakers. Among the
strictly Spanish elements in Philippine Spanish, there are a number of Americanisms, most of
which are clearly Mexican in origin. These evidently date from earlier days of
Hispano-Philippine contacts, when the Manila Galleon departed from the port of Acapulco, since
recent linguistic contacts with Mexico have been almost nonexistent in the Philippines. Among
the most prominent Mexicanisms still in use among current Philippine Spanish speakers are:
zacate `grass,' petate `sleeping mat,' changue [tiangue] `market,' chili `pepper,' camote `sweet
potato,' chongo [chango] `monkey,' palenque `market,' sayote [chayote] `a type of vegetable.' In
order to ask for something not quite heard to be repeated, use of ¿mande? is the rule in Philippine
Spanish, as in Mexico, and the three daily meals are el almuerzo `breakfast,' la comida `lunch'
and `dinner,' following rural Mexican usage, and contrasting with more general Spanish el
desayuno, el almuerzo, and la cena, respectively. Chabacano speakers also use Mexican curses
and obscenities, and such words are not unknown in contemporary Philippine Spanish, although
peninsular Spanish curses are more frequent. Curiously, despite the decidedly aristocratic
character of modern Philippine Spanish, there is comparatively less reluctance to use these forms
in mixed company or among women, perhaps reflecting lack of contact with contemporary
sociolinguistic norms of Spanish-speaking nations. Other common Spanish words have
undergone semantic shifts in Philippine Spanish. The word lenguaje has shifted from `style of
speech' to `national language'; también no is used instead of tampoco in the sense of `not either,'
possibly reflecting old Spanish usage; the expression hay que ver `it must be seen' is the most
frequently used to express surprise or admiration. Also extremely frequent is the idiomatic
expression la mar de `a lot of,' now outmoded in Spain, and the use of gracia for `given name'
(as in ¿cuál es su gracia? `what is your name?') now typical only of some marginal areas of the
Spanish-speaking world. Seguro, meaning `certain, sure' in standard Spanish, means `probably,
maybe' in Chabacano and in contemporary Philippine Spanish; `sure' is rendered by (a)segurao
`assured.' The most striking lexical innovation in Philippine Spanish is the conjugation of the
word cuidado (pronounced cuidao) `caution, concern' in combination with subject pronouns; the
derived meaning is roughly `whatever ... want(s)' or `... will take charge of it.' Combinations
include tú cuidao, usted cuidao, ustedes cuidao, `it's up to you'; yo cuidao `I'll take care of it,'
etc. This expression reflects the syntax of Tagalog bahala in combinations like ako ang
bahala/bahala ko, corresponding to yo cuidao, ikaw ang bahala/bahala ka, equivalent to tú
cuidao, etc., and represents the only widespread case of syntactic transfer from Philippine
languages to non-creole Philippine Spanish

3. Early attestations of Chabacano and Spanish-based pidgins in the Philippines

Frake (1971: 223-224) is unequivocal in his classification of Chabacano, including

Zamboangueño (the main focus of his article):
Philippine Creole Spanish is not simply a Philippine language with unusually
heavy Spanish lexical influence, nor is it Spanish with a large number of
Philippine loan words. It is a distinct language, easily distinguishable from both
its Romance and its Austronesian progenitors ... Philippine Creole Spanish shares
enough in common with the classic creoles of the Caribbean that no one ... would,
I think, challenge its assignment to the category `creole language.'
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Despite Frake's impressive range of data and analysis, some of these conclusions are subject to
reinterpretation. In particular, the notion that Chabacano is, or has always been, `easily
distinguishable' from its Philippine language neighbors is not supported by the full range of
available evidence. Moreover, although Z is definitively a creole, as are the remaining
Chabacano dialects, its inevitable and undiluted origin in the Manila Bay Chabacano dialects is
not a foregone conclusion.
One of the difficulties in tracing the presence and development of Chabacano in the
Philippines is the common confusion of a coherent creole language with `broken Spanish' or
even fluent Spanish. This is true not only for the greater Manila area, but also for the
developing Spanish-derived creole of Zamboanga. Early visits to Zamboanga, in 1772 (Sonnerat
1776: 127) and in 1774-6 (Forrest 1780: 374-5) speak only of `Spaniards' (in reference to the
garrison troops) and of escaped slaves from Jolo (largely of Visayan origin), without noting any
special contact language that might have been in use. Even the language spoken by the
`Spanish' troops must be suspect; Sonnerat (1776: 128-9) observed that the fort was guarded by
`des gens bannis des Etats Espagnols, aussi prêts sans doute à le livrer qu'a le défendre' [men
expelled from Spanish colonies, doubtlessly as willing to surrender the fort as to defend it].
Martínez de Zúñiga (1973: 236-7), describing the situation in the Philippines at the turn of the
19th century, noted that few Filipinos spoke Spanish. The exception was in the San Roque
barrio of Cavite, where `they speak a kind of Spanish which has been corrupted and whose
phraseology is entirely taken from the dialect of the country' (p. 250). The reference is clearly to
Caviteño Chabacano, so that the author should have recognized Chabacano had he found it
elsewhere. Upon describing Zamboanga, however, Martínez de Zúñiga only mentioned the
Spanish garrison, `5,162 souls composed of natives, Spaniards, soldiers and prisoners,' with no
indication that anything other than (non-creole) Spanish or Philippine languages were spoken
there.
Some Spanish was apparently spoken in the Sulu Sea early in the 19th century. Moor
(1837: 37) mentions Moslem Datus on Jolo who spoke Spanish, a fact also noticed by Yvan
(1855: 230), and Saleeby (1980: 164-5). However, visitors to Zamboanga during the same
period still note only Spanish (spoken by Spanish troops) or else `Moro' as spoken by Muslims
from Jolo. This includes Keppel (1853: 70f.), St. John (1853: 131-2), Marryat (1848), Mallat
(1846) and many others. In fact the general lack of knowledge of Spanish among Filipinos was
frequently commented on by visitors to the islands. Bowring (1859: 28) speaking of the Manila
working class, estimated that not one in a hundred spoke or understood Spanish. Lannoy (1849:
33) observed that indigenous political leaders were required to speak Spanish, but that this
requirement was not enforced. Of Zamboanga, Lannoy noted that the garrison had roughly 380
men, of which were 11 were officers, 6 were sub-officers, and 24 were corporals. Of the
linguistic and cultural problems, he noted (pp. 71-2) that `près de la moitié des officiers
subalternes dans les régiments sont des indigènes, parlant la langue du soldat et jalousant les
officiers espagnols, que parviennent seuls aux grades supérieurs. C'est là une cause constante de
mésintelligence et d'irritation ...' [more than half the sub-officers are natives, speaking the
soldiers' language and resenting the Spanish officers, who exclusively hold the higher ranks.
This is a constant source of misunderstanding and irritation ...]. MacMicking (1967: 92),
writing in the 1850's, commented that most Filipinos could not speak Spanish, although `most of
those in the neighborhood of Manilla can speak it after a fashion.' Jagor (1875: 156) stated that
most soldiers spoke no Spanish.
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Also instructive of the existence of Chabacano dialects in Zamboanga and elsewhere, and
of the awareness of such varieties by outsiders, are observers' lists of languages spoken in each
area of the Philippines. Jagor (1875: 55-6) assigned Spanish and Tagalog in that order to
Cavite; Tagalog, Spanish, and Chinese to Manila; Spanish and Manobo to Cotabato; and
`Mandaya' and Spanish to Zamboanga. Escosura and Cañamaque (1882: xxiii), writing in the
1860's, assign Spanish and Tagalog to Cavite; Tagalog, Spanish, and Chinese to Manila; Spanish
and `Moro' to Basilan; and only Spanish to Zamboanga. This would indicate that Zamboanga
was the most Spanish-speaking area of the Philippines in the mid 19th century. However, the
same authors (p. 5) lament that native Filipinos speak only español de cocina, so that the
designation `Spanish' assigned to Cavite, Manila and Zamboanga could well represent a Spanish
pidgin, if not PCS. The information sifted and analyzed by Schuchardt (1883) would suggest
that `Malayo-Spanish' was more typical of Manila and Cavite, and that Zamboanga might
actually be Spanish-speaking.
The paucity of documentation on the language(s) spoken in colonial Zamboanga and the
ambiguity of the existent attestations is surprising in view of the strategic importance of this port,
the southernmost city in Spanish-controlled Philippines. Zamboanga was a way-station for
travellers from every direction, and was constantly visited by Spaniards and foreigners alike. For
the Spanish government, Zamboanga continued to be an important military defense against
constant raiding by pirates and slavers from Jolo and other Moslem territories, and although the
commercial importance of the city declined, overshadowed by growing urban areas such as
Cotabato, Spain continued to maintain contact with Zamboanga until the end of the colonial
period. It seems logical to surmise that had a Spanish-based creole significantly different from
received Spanish been spoken in this important garrison town, it would not have escaped the
scrutiny of Spanish authorities in Zamboanga. Alternative explanations must be sought, which
take into account the constant Spanish and foreign observation of language and culture in
Zamboanga, from the latter decades of the 18th century until the present time.
It is conceivable that Spaniards and other visitors regarded an evolving Z dialect of PCS
as a broken language, the español de cocina or `kitchen Spanish' that was used to designate
Spanish-based pidgins in Manila. This hypothesis seems unlikely, since extrapolation backward
from the earliest attestations of Z (last decade of the 19th century) suggests that Z had attained its
contemporary grammatical structures at least by the middle of the 19th century. By this time,
explicit descriptions of what was known as español de cocina were widely available in 19th
century Philippine Spanish literature, and this language is still recalled by some of the oldest
residents of Manila. The latter language, however, was a rough pidgin, usually spoken by
Chinese or other `foreigners,' and contained few if any of the consistent grammatical structures
which characterize PCS: detailed TMA particle system, fixed syntax, hybrid Spanish-Philippine
pronominal system, etc. `Kitchen Spanish' as spoken by Chinese sanglays as they were known
in the Philippines is typified by the following example (López 1893: 58): `sigulo, señolía ...
como no tiene ahola talabajo; como no tiene capé, y ha de ganalo la vida, sigulo tiene que hace
tabaco' [of course, sir; since {I} do not have a job now, and since {I} don't have any coffee, and
{I} have to earn a living, of course {I} have to make cigars]. Another example (Montero y Vidal
1876: 241) is `Mia quiele platicalo' [I want to speak with you]. Feced (1888: 77) gives
examples like `guerra, señolía, malo negocio ... mía aquí vendelo, ganalo' [war is bad business,
sir; I am here selling and earning {money}]. Moya y Jiménez (1883: 334) gives `mueno dia
señolía ... ¿cosa quiele? mia tiene nuevo patila ...' [good day, Sir, what do you want? I have
new merchandise]. Mallat (1846: 352) gives examples like `si que le compela cosa, cosa
 10

siñolita' [yes, buy many things, miss], and Saenz de Urraca (1889:142) gives todo balato, balato
[everything {is} cheap]. Rizal (1891:121-2) has `siño Simoun, mia pelilo, mia luinalo’ [Mr.
Simon, I lost it, I ruined it]; `Cosa? No tiene biligüensa, mas que mia chino mia siempele genti.
Ah, sigulo no siñola bilalelo …’ [what? Have you no shame; although I’m Chinese, I’m still a
person. Surely {she} is not a true lady]; Mía cobalalo? Ah, sigulo suyo no sabe. Cuando pelilo
ne juego nunca pagalo. Mueno suya tiene consu, puele obligá, mia no tiene’ [Me collect {the
debt}? Oh, of course you don’t know. When {someone} loses in gambling, they never pay.
You have a consulate, you can oblige {them to pay}; I don’t have any]. In addition to the lack of
archetypal Chabacano syntactic patterns, these examples illustrate at least three features which
were never documented for Chabacano, but which do occur in other Spanish pidgins (as well as
in Chinese pidgin English): use of mi/mia as subject pronoun, lateralization of intervocalic /r/,
and pleonastic clitics, as in platicalo.
Authentic `kitchen Spanish' was used only between native Filipinos and Chinese
merchants, or between these groups and Spaniards, much as the `bamboo Spanish' of Mindanao
came to be used among and with Japanese arrivals in the early 20th century. It was never used
natively, and was never used mutually by Philippine residents who spoke a common native
language. In particular, the term `kitchen Spanish' was never applied to true PCS varieties such
as C or T, except in error. For example, Montero y Vidal (1876: 97) offers the following
excerpt from a conversation between a Spaniard recently arrived in the Philippines and a
compatriot with long residence in the islands: `---¿Y eso de que los criados entienden todas las
cosas al revés? ---Aprenda a hablarles en el idioma sui generis, que llamamos aquí español de
cocina, repieiéndoles tres veces la misma cosa. Verá V. cómo lo entienden' [And what's that
about how the servants get everything backwards? ---Learn to talk to them in that lingo that we
call `kitchen Spanish' here, repeating everything three times. You will see how well they
understand]. Escosura (1882: 5) lamented that `los indios mismos que se tienen por instruídos en
castellano, lo están tan poco, que es preciso para que comprendan hablarles una especie de
algarabía que vulgarmente se llama español de cocina; y para entenderlos a ellos, estar
habituados al mismo bárbaro lenguaje' [even the Indians who supposedly have learned Spanish
know so little that for them to understand one must speak to them in a sort of jargon known as
kitchen Spanish, and to understand them, one must get used to the same horrendous language].
Given the Spaniards' strong negative feelings to `kitchen Spanish,' if they had observed that such
a language was the predominant tongue of an entire population, whose speakers used it amongst
themselves rather than only to foreigners, this would surely have been mentioned.
There are also many examples of Philippine pidgin Spanish as used by native Filipinos,
with some creoloid characteristics but still representing an imperfectly acquired second
language:
No puede, ama; aquel matandá Juancho, casado también `[it] isn't possible, ma'am; that
no-good Juancho is also married'
¿Cosa va a hacer ya si nació viva? Siguro yo pegué plojo aquel día `what can [I] do if
[the baby] was born alive? I must have been wrong that day.' (Rincón 1897: 22-3)
Pues suya cuidado, pero esa tiene novio castila y seguro no ha de querer con suya `That's
your business, but that woman has a Spanish boyfriend and she surely won't have
anything to do with you' (Montero y Vidal 1876: 240)
Mira, jablá tú con aquel tu tata que no suelte el cualtas `Hey, tell your father not to give
out the money' (López 1893: 35)
Camino, señor bueno `The road [is] good, sir'
 11

Usted señor, bajar, y yo apartar animales `You sir, will get down [from the carriage]; I
will disperse the animals'
Señor, malo este puente `Sir, this bridge [is] no good' (Feced 1888: 20-1)
Bueno, señor, aquí comer `Well, sir, here [you can] eat' (Feced 1888: 24)
Ese palo largo con cordeles atados a su punta y a las puntas de los cordeles anzuelos, cosa
buena, señor. Cuando se escapa un preso, corro yo tras de él, se lo echo encima y
queda cogido. `Sir, that long stick with ropes tied to the end and hooks on the ends of
the ropes is a good thing. When a prisoner escapes, I run after him and I throw the
thing over him, and he's caught' (Feced 1888: 34)
No hay ya, siñol; pudo quedá sin el plasa, porque sisante hace tiempo, cuando aquel cosa
del flata ... pero no necesitá `He [doesn't work there] any more, sir; he lost the job,
he's been out of work for some time, since the time of the money affair, but [he]
doesn't need [it] (Rincón 1896: 16-17)
Siguro ha roto aquel rienda, pero en un poco arreglarlo `Those reins have probably
broken, but [I] can fix them in a short time' (Rincón 1896: 27)
Metapísico pa, premature no más! Con que no se concibe, ja? `A metaphysician, eh?
You’re premature. So you don’t know, eh?’ (Rizal 1891:98) {mockingly said by a
Spanish professor to a Philippine student}
Usté ya no más cuidado con mi viuda y mis huérfanos `You won’t take care of my widow
and my orphan children’ (Rizal 1891:222)
None of these examples was presented as an instance of Chabacano; most were proffered as
illustrations of imperfect acquisition of Spanish by natives of the Philippines, while other
examples were presented without comment as `Philippine Spanish.' Nonetheless, the last set of
examples represents neither creolized Spanish nor Chinese Spanish pidgin, but rather a wide
gamut of L2 approximations to European Spanish by Filipinos who had only occasional
opportunities to learn and speak Spanish. A comparison of Chabacano and Philippine `bamboo
Spanish' shows that the latter shares some of the creoloid features of the former: word order,
gravitation towards the 3 s. verb form, some Philippine and Spanish-derived particles, use of
cosa as interrogative word, and some aorist constructions (derived from the Spanish infinitive)
without TMA particles. However, `bamboo Spanish' lacks the full range of grammatical
structures found in Philippine Creole Spanish, and to the extent that it was based on foreigner-
talk proffered by expatriate Spaniards, makes greater use of the bare infinitive than occurs in
actual Philippine L2 Spanish.
Finally, a few attestations of legitimate Chabacano crop up in late 19th century literary texts,
invariably from Cavite or Manila, and never identified explicitly as anything other than `broken
Spanish’:
si vos quiere, yo ta emprestá con V. cuatro pesos para el fiestajan del bautizo `if you
wish, I can lend you four pesos for the baptism celebration' (Rincón 1897:22-3)
Siguro ese aquel que ta mandá prendé cunisós `He’s probably the one that had us
arrested’ (López 1893:35)
¿Ya cogí ba con Tadeo? `Did they catch Tadeo yet?’ (Rizal 1891:220)
No jablá vos puelte, ñora, baká pa di quedá vos cómplice. Ya quemá yo ñga el libro que
ya dale prestau conmigo. Baká pa di riquisá y di encontrá. Anda vos listo, ñora.
`Don’t speak so loud, ma’am, or you’ll be taken for an accomplice. I burned the book
that [he] loaned me. Otherwise they could search and find [it]. Be careful, ma;am’
(Rizal 1891:220)
 12

Conmigo no ta debí nada. Y cosa di jasé Paulita? `He doesn’t owe me anything. And
what will Paulita do?’ (Rizal 1891:220)
These examples show the preverbal particle ta, the future/irrealis particle di, the
accusative/dative marker con, and the first-person plural pronoun nisós, found in Cavite and
formerly in Ermita (the Ternate form is mihotro, while Zamboanga has kamé [exclusive] and kitá
[inclusive].
Despite the initial improbability, it is conceivable that Philippine residents of Zamboanga
were in fact speaking Spanish at the time the earlier travel accounts were written, at least a close
enough approximation to Spanish which Spaniards and other foreign observers would regard as a
legitimate approximation to international standards, and not simply `kitchen Spanish.' The
current grammatical structure of Z differs significantly from any variety of Spanish, and the two
languages are to a large extent mutually non-intelligible between non-initiated speakers of each
language. Thus the notion that any non-creolized form of Spanish was spoken in Zamboanga by
native Filipinos initially seems unlikely; however, additional evidence deriving from
reconstruction and extrapolation from current configurations suggests that this notion may be
largely accurate. First, a large proportion of outsiders' descriptions of the linguistic profile of the
Philippines in the 19th and early 20th centuries are very ambiguous, reflecting a combination of
ingenuousness, ignorance, and undisguised xenophobic, and many of the descriptions could well
encompass anything from a rudimentary pidgin to a close approximation to European Spanish,
perhaps with only a segmental or suprasegmental accent. Consider the following typical
traveller's view of the `Spanish' of the Philippines (Dauncey 1910: 212-3):
I daresay you are surprised at my accounts of these and other conversations in
Spanish, but the fact is, though I have not tried to learn the patois that obtains in
the Philippines, I find it impossible not to pick up a good deal ... They speak
badly, though, and the accent does not sound a bit like what one heard in Spain,
besides which, there are so many native and Chinese words in current use.
Instead of saying andado, they say andao; pasao for pasado; and so on, with all
the past participles, besides other variations on the pure Castilian tongue. I found
that the Spanish grammars and books I had brought with me were of so little use
for every-day life that I gave up trying to learn out of them ...
It is apparent that Mrs. Dauncey was ignorant of legitimately `Castilian' usage, where among
other features the realization of -ado as -ao is frequent and socially accepted. Given her silence
on more substantive grammatical matters (despite her claim that grammatical textbooks were of
no use), we are left with no useful description of Philippine Spanish. Indeed, non-creole Spanish
of the Philippines is quite close to Peninsular `Castilian' models, being spoken largely by
families with recent ancestors from Spain, and differing from the dialects of the latter country
mainly in pronunciation and the occasional slight grammatical or lexical difference. Dauncey's
evident inability to understand the `Spanish' of the Philippines constitutes evidence that PCS is
what she encountered, despite the lack of corroborative evidence that any Spanish-based creole
was ever spoken outside of the Manila Bay enclaves and the previously-mentioned cities of
Mindanao. She may also have encountered the `kitchen Spanish,' still alive and well only a few
years after the official Spanish departure from the Philippines, and which would be offered to a
foreign visitor who apparently did not speak `proper' Spanish herself.
Other observers of the linguistic situation in Zamboanga were less ambiguous. Thus,
Worcester (1898: 130) noted that `On account of the multiplicity of native dialects, Spanish
became the medium of communication, but they have long since converted it into a
 13

Zamboangueño patois which is quite unintelligible to one familiar only with pure "Castellano."'
This can only have been a very recent form of Z. Russell (1907: 172), who visited Zamboanga
in 1900, and who had considerable knowledge of Spanish, referred to `Zamboanganese' as `a
mixture of Castilian, Visayan and Malay.' She also refers to Zamboangueños speaking
`unintelligible Spanish' in moments of excitement. The latter two descriptions are the exception
rather than the rule, however, and the majority of 19th century descriptions of Zamboanga
mention only `Spanish,' without any suggestion that Peninsular Spanish coexisted with a
Spanish-based creole.
Z continues to be a vigorous living language, whose oldest living speakers were born
towards the end of the 19th century, and who often recall even earlier speech patterns. Thus it is
possible, through a combination of fieldwork and oral history, to at least partially reconstruct the
linguistic situation of Zamboanga as far back as the middle of the 19th century, with some
measure of certainty. This should allow the ambiguous and confusing travellers' accounts to be
confronted with hard data, enabling a more accurate picture to emerge. In practice, despite the
ready availability of field informants, matters are not always so simple. In my own fieldwork,
residents of Zamboanga who had been born in the late 1800's were interviewed, as well as
younger residents who accurately recalled the speech of parents and grandparents born even
earlier, thus pushing back the date as far as the middle of the 19th century for reasonably
trustworthy accounts of Z. In speaking with the oldest residents and in hearing accounts of
earlier stages of Z, the observer is immediately struck by the much higher similarity to Spanish.
Most of the interview subjects were aware of later accretions to their own usage, typical of
contemporary Z, particularly as regards more Philippine lexical items and syntactic particles.
Many older residents are fluent in Spanish, and their at times precarious awareness of the
difference between `Spanish' and `Chabacano' suggests that the latter term was once applied to
Spanish derivatives that were significantly less creolized than modern Z. On numerous
occasions, although by that time I had mastered Z to the point that no patently Spanish items
were slipping in, I was confronted by older `Zamboangueño' speakers who mixed unadulterated
Spanish forms, including conjugated verbs, gender and number agreement and more Spanish-like
word order, into spontaneous conversations in which the environment gave no indication of
upwardly striving language. Such Spanish forms are never used by younger residents of
Zamboanga (except occasionally by a handful of radio announcers), and most are not even
accurately identifiable by younger community members. When asked to describe the Chabacano
speech of older rural residents (known as Chabacano ondo `deep Chabacano'), younger
informants could often come up with lexical items, but none explicitly commented on the use of
Spanish morphological inflection. When I spoke in Spanish, upon request, younger Zamboanga
residents were often unable to comprehend more than the bare minimum, while some
commented (with dubious accuracy) that their grandparents or great-grandparents spoke
similarly. Another indication of the indeterminacy concerning the use of `Spanish' came when
the present writer inquired for names of Zamboanga natives who could speak Spanish, in
addition to Z. Virtually every person consulted could come up with names, most representing
either middle-aged residents who had studied in private schools run by Spanish religious figures,
or old rural informants. Subsequent interviews with individuals so identified produced a wide
range of results. A few were able to clearly differentiate `Spanish' and Z, but most individuals in
this category are highly educated with considerable formal training in Spanish. Individuals
identified by others as speaking `Spanish' but who lacked formal training in the latter language
 14

were more likely to speak a fluid mixture of indisputably creole forms common to all speakers of
Z and inflected Spanish forms not found in Z.
Probing the existing population of Z speakers, and attempting to push back the time base
for reconstructing the immediate precursor of Z leads back to the same indeterminacy and
apparent muddle concerning the relationship between `Spanish' and Z as a legitimately different
form of Chabacano. At the crux of the dilemma is the underlying assumption that the Spanish-
based contact languages known collectively as Chabacano are the result of total creolization, i.e.
representing an abrupt break from the patrimonial Spanish which was brought to the Philippines.
According to such a belief, the only possible scenario for the inability to assign an element
unambiguously to `Spanish' or `Chabacano' is some type of `post-creole continuum,' in which
decreolization or reintroduction of Spanish results in a more `Hispanized' Chabacano. The facts
regarding Z point in the opposite direction, however. Spanish, at any level of fluency, has all but
disappeared from Zamboanga City and its environs (except for some unadulterated Spanish
forms reintroduced by radio broadcasters--cf. Lipski 1986a, 1987f--which, however show no
signs of spreading to general usage). A century ago, however, Spanish was more widely known,
and the further back in time the probe is pushed, the blurrier becomes the `Spanish'/`Chabacano'
distinction. In other words, contemporary Z is much less like Spanish, and comes closer to
fitting the diagnostics for abrupt creolization, than its predecessors. Clearly, such a configuration
is not indicative of decreolization or a post-creole continuum, but rather of a significantly
different model of formation, in which creolization in the sense of a geneological discontinuity
played a minimal role. This in turn calls for a reevaluation of the theories regarding the
formation of Z and other PCS dialects, and the proposing of alternative sources of creoloid
structures in the formative stages of Z.

4. Towards a theory of the formation of Zamboangueño

Most descriptions of PCS have not distinguished between Z and the Manila Bay varieties,
assuming implicitly or explicitly that Z is simply the offspring of an earlier transplant of Manila
Bay PCS. Whinnom (1956:3) hypothesized that the formation of the PCS dialects, including Z,
was the result of linguistic and cultural mestizaje between Spanish-speaking garrison troops
(soldiers from the lowest social classes) and Malay speakers: `only the convivence, and indeed
intermarriage, of Spaniard and Malay can account for the fact that a creolized language emerged
in the brief space of two generations.' More recently, McWhorter (2000:14) dismisses
Chabacano as `having emerged via marriages between Iberian men and Philippine women,’
completely overlooking the origins of Zamboangueño and even Caviteño in nearly all-male
military garrisons. The garrison troops, whose presence in Zamboanga was the strongest
Spanish influence during the formative period of Z, were drawn from Mexico and from
elsewhere in the Philippines, especially from Luzon and some central islands. The Philippine
soldiers presumably learned Spanish from the Mexican troops, and from other Spanish speakers
already in the Philippines.
Frake (1971) implicitly accepts Whinnom's hypothesis of the garrison-troop origin of Z,
but makes the intriguing observation that many of the contemporary Philippine items in Z do not
come from the geographically contiguous Visayan languages, but from Hiligaynon (Ilongo),
spoken in the Central Philippines. Most of the words in question are lexical items with no
particular semantic restrictions, but a number of core syntactic items are included. Frake gives
no explanation for the presence of Ilongo items in Z, except to suggest that many garrison troops
probably came from the Ilongo-speaking area. There may be additional or alternative routes of
 15

penetration; for example, Iloilo (the principle city in the Ilongo region) was one of the main
stopover ports for ships travelling from Manila to Zamboanga (Warren 1981), and it is likely that
Ilongo speakers were picked up along the way. Another potential missing link in the evolution
and spread of the various PCS dialects comes from the indirect evidence that when Zamboanga
was rebuilt in 1719, many PCS-speaking families from Cavite emigrated to Zamboanga, with
some remaining in Iloilo (Germán 1984). Although PCS never became implanted in Iloilo, if
family ties existed between Iloilo and Zamboanga, including the possibility for subsequent
migration of settlers originally stopping in Iloilo, Ilongo words could have arrived in Zamboanga
by this means. Maria Isabelita Riego de Dios (personal communication) has also discovered that
many laborers were recruited from Panay (the main island where Ilongo was spoken) during the
time period when Zamboanga and Cotabato were building up their military defenses, and she
suggests that the Ilongo elements in the PCS dialects of both cities is a direct result of this
immigration.
Much of the failure to separate the formation of Z from the Manila Bay PCS varieties
comes from the status of the latter creoles in theories of Iberian-based creole formation.
Whinnom (1956) was the first to hint at a possibility which was later to become a full-fledged
theory, namely that a large number of Asian-Iberian creoles, from India to Indonesia and
including PCS in the Philippines, result from a single precursor, a Portuguese maritime pidgin
which mixed with local languages as well as with other colonial superstrata to yield the variety
of creoles now found in Asia and Oceania. Whinnom (1956), in a remarkable feat of historical
reconstruction, postulated that the seeds of PCS were first sown on the Indonesian island of
Ternate in the 17th century, where a Portuguese-based creole apparently arose on this important
member of the Spice Islands. When the speakers of this proto-Portuguese creole were expelled
sometime later, these Mardikas or Merdikas as they were known ended up in the Spanish colony
of the Philippines, settling in several small villages along Manila Bay. The town of Ternate,
where the PCS variety T is spoken, appears to have been named after the Indonesian island, and
oral tradition among the Ternateños refers to the Mardikas. Since T seems to be the oldest
surviving variety of PCS, the chronology is at least correct. Currently all traces of any
Portuguese-based creole have disappeared from Ternate, Indonesia. A few years ago, a sultan
from the latter island visited Ternate, Manila and found the T variety of Chabacano totally
incomprehensible, not even recognizing individual words.
Despite Whinnom's pioneering contributions on the origins of the Manila Bay PCS
dialects, his description of Z is sketchy, inaccurate, and based on second-hand sources. He
assumed, naturally enough, that some form of Manila Bay PCS had been carried to the Spanish
garrison at Zamboanga, where it continued to flourish and evolve; any differences between Z and
the Manila Bay PCS dialects were presumably the result of local accretions rather than from a
separate formative process. Subsequent in-depth investigations of Z, such as Frake (1971, 1980)
and Forman (1972) implicitly assume some version of Whinnom's hypothesis. In view of the
significant structural similarities between Z on the one hand and C and T on the other, it is not
feasible to claim totally independent creolization in Zamboanga. However, additional evidence
suggests that Z did not simply grow from a nucleus of transplanted Manila Bay PCS.
The only challenges to the notion that Z is somehow a transplanted variety of Manila Bay
PCS with local overlays come from non-linguistic accounts, which often err in the direction of
assuming no connection at all between Z and its Manila Bay homologues. The most elaborate
alternative account of the formation of Z is suggested by Warren (1981). From the 17th century
to well into the 19th century, Moslem pirates and slave raiders from Jolo and other islands in the
 16

Sulu Sea attacked many parts of the Philippines and carried off captives, who were pressed into
slavery. Many of the slaves held on Jolo managed to escape to Zamboanga. Spanish and
English military vessels also rescued slaves, usually depositing them at the nearest port under
Spanish control; Zamboanga was a frequent dropoff point. Some freed slaves delivered to
Zamboanga were once more forced to labor by the Spanish military authorities, and thus spent
more time in the vicinity of Fort Pilar than they had originally intended, long enough, perhaps,
for a Spanish-based contact vernacular to form or be extended by speakers of different Philippine
languages. Warren (1981: 235-6) speculates thus:
The fugitives established themselves with impoverished Chinese and vagrants in a
community situated some distance from the presidio. Originating from different
parts of the Philippine archipelago and lacking a common language, these
degradados developed their own Spanish-Creole dialect -- Chavacano -- to
communicate. A large percentage of the surrounding rural population labelled
Zamboangueno at the end of the nineteenth century were descendants of fugitive
slaves who had lived on the margins of the presidio as social outcasts.
This idea is not new, for Worcester (1898: 129-30), in describing the population of Zamboanga,
stated that:
... certainly a very considerable portion [of the Zamboangueños] are the offspring
of slaves who have contrived to escape from the Moros ... the result has been that
representatives of most of the Philippine coast-tribes have found their way to
Zamboanga, where their intermarriage has given rise to a people of decidedly
mixed ancestry. On account of the multiplicity of native dialects, Spanish became
the medium of communication, but they have long since converted it into a
Zamboangueño patois ...
In a later account, Worcester (1930: 512) noted that `Zamboanga was at the outset populated by
escaped Moro slaves who had sought the protection of the Spanish garrison there. Coming
originally from widely separated parts of the archipelago, these unfortunates had no common
native dialect, hence there arose among them a Spanish patois known as Zamboangueño.'
Other descriptions of Zamboanga also speak of the mixed origins of its residents. Thus
Vendrell y Eduard (1887:62), in speaking of Zamboanga, observed that `estos indgenas, la
inmensa mayoría mestizos españoles, proceden en su origen de otras provincias del Archipélago,
y muchos de Méjico, de donde llegaron á principios de este siglo, cuando perdimos aquel
imperio’ [these indigenous people, the great majority of whom are Spanish mestizos, originally
come from other provinces and from México, whence they arrived at the beginning of this
century when we lost that empire]. These accounts suggest that Z arose in situ as a contact
vernacular among transients and freed slaves. While it is likely that the linguistic heterogeneity
of the Zamboanga garrison and its environs was conducive to the evolution of whatever Spanish-
based lingua franca was adopted there, it is not possible to accept that Z arose ab ovo in
Zamboanga or anywhere else in Mindanao. A number of factors militate against such a position.
First, the grammatical similarities between Z and Manila Bay PCS dialects are too striking to
overlook, and point in the direction of importation of at least some grammatical elements from
Manila Bay. It is likely that freed slaves in Zamboanga would adopt an already existent Spanish-
based pidgin/creole, assuming such was already in existence in the military camp, and
particularly if large numbers of former slaves were forced to labor in the fort. If these ex-slaves
remained outside the pale of the fort, however (as observed by Sonnerat 1776: 127), it is more
likely that a contact vernacular based primarily on Philippine languages would have arisen. My
 17

own research suggests that such a Philippine-based contact vernacular did indeed serve as the
primary input to Z, but assuming the latter to have derived only from the speech of former slaves
would not account for the similarities with Manila Bay PCS. At the same time, a much more
heterogeneous mix of lexical items from scattered Philippine languages would be expected for
such an extramural developing creole. Z lexical items of Philippine origin come, in descending
order, from (i) regional Visayan, which has become a frequently spoken language in western
Mindanao at least in the last century; (ii) Ilongo; (iii) very occasionally, Tagalog. Finally, known
demographic and historical facts about Zamboanga fail to confirm the notion that a `large
percentage' of rural Zamboangueños descend from former slaves, although the fact that a
Spanish-based contact vernacular rather than a local Philippine language is spoken so far from
Zamboanga City must be accounted for. Since the non-Moslem population of southwestern
Mindanao was quite small prior to the establishment of Zamboanga, the answer may lie in the
simple fact that there was no appropriate local language available to the developing rural
Christian population. The views of Worcester, Warren and others who postulate that Z was
essentially created in Zamboanga cannot be sustained as the principal hypothesis, although there
is no doubt that returned slaves and other transients who made their way into Zamboanga were
instrumental in increasing the number of speakers of any Spanish-based contact language.
A key factor in tracing the development of Z is the determination of the features already
present in non-creole varieties of Spanish used by Philippine natives. Although little direct
documentation is available on earlier stages of Philippine Spanish, data from the last decades of
the 19th century suggest that many of the features of Z than cannot be directly traced either to
European Spanish or to a cross-section of Philippine languages were to be found in the
`Philippinized' Spanish used widely between Spaniards and Filipinos for several centuries. The
ultimate source of such pre-creole items remains to be determined. Chinese merchants may have
introduced some key items into `kitchen Spanish'; if some of the Chinese had previously learned
a Portuguese-based pidgin or creole in Macau or Hong Kong, they might use the same words
when attempting to speak Spanish, a language which they would identify with Portuguese. For
example, the use of what appears to be a first-person subject pronoun derived from mi, which is
never found in any variety of PCS, may have been transferred either from Portuguese pidgin or
from Chinese pidgin English (e.g. Montero y Vidal 1876: 241, `Mia quiele platicalo' and Feced
1888: 77, mía aquí vendelo, ganalo'). Other items may have been introduced by Spaniards,
based on stereotypes of pidgin speech which had already been solidified for Afro-Hispanic
speech, including literary stereotypes dating from the beginning of the 16th century (cf. Lipski
1991). Most of the creoloid forms appear to be simply represent the natural amalgam of Spanish
words and Philippine morphosyntactic patterns, calques into Spanish that would be immediately
recognized by any Philippine speaker, and which could be understood at least partially by native
Spanish speakers. Since identical or similar expressions are found in nearly all Philippine
languages, Philippine listeners immediately understand the expression the first time they hear it,
and Spanish-speaking arrivals in the Philippines picked up this expression as one of the first
accretions to their `colonial' lexicon.
Many other pieces of the Z puzzle can also be found in non-creolized Philippine Spanish.
For example, the use of cosa as a generic interrogative is attested in Philippine Spanish, ranging
from reasonably fluent to `kitchen Spanish' varieties:
(Feced 1888: 68-69): `¿También redactarás las actas de las sesiones? ---¿Cosa eso,
señor?' [Will you also take minutes of the meetings? What is that, sir?]
 18

(Feced 1888: 91): `Quiero decir que tendrás muchos galanes. ---¿Cosa galanes?' [I mean
that you must have many beaus. What are beaus?]
Montero y Vidal (1876: 239): `¿Cosa, señolía?' [what is it, sir?]. (López (1893: 34):
`¿Cosa? preguntó el maestro' [What is it? asked the teacher].
(Entrala 1882: 12): `¿Cosa dice?' [what is he saying?].
(Entrala 1882: 22): `Cosa Goyo? ... cosa tiene?' [What is it, Goyo? ... what is there?]
The latter quote also exemplifies the use of affirmative tiene to indicate `there is/are,' also found
in Entrala (1882: 22): `Tiene canin, tiene nata, tiene coco ... ' [there is {cooked} rice, there is
cream, there are coconuts ...]. Other interrogative words are used similarly, for example cual
(Entrala 1882: 32): `Cual aquel?' [which one is that?].
PCS varieties, including Z, are characterized by an invariable verbal stem, usually
derived from the infinitive minus final /r/. In the case of `modal' verbs and some other verbs, the
third person singular form has been taken over: puede, tiene, sabe, etc. Vestigial and semifluent
Spanish of many countries is noted for the gravitation of verbal paradigms to the third person
singular, an attestation of partial agreement. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese employs this
strategy, as do vestigial dialects of Spanish. In contemporary Philippine Spanish, vestigial
speakers occasionally reduce verbs to the third person singular. This is by no means an
indication of a recent development found only among generations of Filipinos for whom Spanish
is only a partially-learned ancestral language. There is ample evidence of this tendency in earlier
stages of Philippine Spanish, when the language varieties in question represented the base variety
of `Spanish'; for example:
(Feced 1888: 90): `¿Capaz serás todavía de enamorar a algún capitán y casarte otra vez?
---No sabe, señor.' [Could you still get some captain to fall in love with you and
marry again? {I} don't know, sir.]
(Feced 1888: 103): `Oy, piloto, ven acá: ¿tú conoces esto? ---Conoce, señor ...' [Hey,
pilot, come here. Do you know about this? {I} know, sir.]
(Feced 1888: 108): `¡Cochero! ¿Qué entiendes tú de eso? ---¡Sí, entiende, señor!'
[Driver! What do you make of this? Yes, {I} understand, sir!].
In Z, nuay < Spanish no hay `there does not exist' behaves exactly as its Visayan and
Tagalog homologues, wala and dili, not only to refer to lack of existence, but to negate certain
verbs. The same usage recurs consistently in non-creolized Philippine Spanish: speakers of
Philippine Spanish at times used no hay to indicate that a person or thing inquired after was not
present:
Feced (1888: 15): `Que venga el médico,---dije al muchacho indio que me servía
de ayuda de cámara. ---No hay más, señor. ---¿Cómo no hay más? ---Se ha
marchado á recoger un muerto á dos días de caballo.' [Have the doctor come, I
told the Indian {= native} cabin boy. He's gone sir. What do you mean he's
gone? He went to pick up a dead person; it's two days on horseback].
Similarly, use of no hay to replace no tener `not to have,' is attested in Philippine Spanish:
(Entrala 1882: 12): `que no hay cualtas' [{he says} that {he} has no money].
The use of con as objective case marker in Z and occasionally in the Manila Bay PCS
dialects has already been commented on, together with the fortuitous similarity with some
Visayan pronominals. In non-creole Philippine Spanish, use of con to signal accusative case is
also attested:
Señor, haga pabor de emprestar conmigo cuatro pesos' `Sir, please lend me four pesos'
(Feced 1888: 42)
 19

Pues suya cuidado, pero esa tiene novio castila y seguro no ha de querer con suya `Well,
that;s his problem, but she has a Spanish fiancée and she probably doesn't love
him' (Montero y Vidal 1876: 240)
señor, V. sin duda no recordar conmigo `Sir, of course you don't remember me' (Moya y
Jiménez 1883: 293)
señor, más mejor que de usted conmigo seis pesos de sueldo ... `sir, it would be better for
you to give me six pesos' salary ...' (Moro y Jiménez 1883: 285)
An example of Chinese `kitchen Spanish' is:
(López 1893: 58): `¡Ah! señolia, mucho disgustalo ele con suya, polque señolia
manda plendé con ele' [Oh sir, he is very angry with you, because you had him
arrested].
A characteristic of Z, calquing a wide variety of Philippine languages, is the lack of
copula with Adj + Noun combinations. The same combinations are attested for non-creole
Philippine Spanish:
Señor, malo este bache ... malo este puente grande `Sir, this pot hole {is} bad ... this big
bridge {is} bad' (Feced 1888: 21)
Seguro tú grande el robo `You {can be} sure {it was a} big robbery' Entrala (1882: 22)
V. magandang lalaque; fino el talle, bueno el cara `You are a fine lad; slim-waisted,
good-looking' Entrala (1882: 23)
pero malo ese ... `but that guy is bad' López (1893: 34)
The preceding examples show that Philippine Spanish, developing slowly throughout the
major population centers of the islands and incorporating calques of regional Philippine
languages, already contained the seeds of many creoloid structures, which when added to the mix
of Spanish and cognate Philippine elements in the formative period of Z would enhance
emerging creole structures. Philippine Spanish, at lower levels of fluency, also embodies
considerable grammatical simplification which does not specifically reflect Philippine syntax,
but which is common to reduced and vestigial forms of Spanish of other nations. Even in the
20th century, travelers continued to describe rudimentary Philippine Spanish with the same terms
used in previous centuries. Russell (1907) refers to the use of `broken Spanish' in several parts
of the country, and at one point a man spoke to her in `what he was pleased to consider Spanish'
(p. 81). Correa de Malvehy (1908:109), visiting the Philippines towards the end of the 19th
century, makes similar reference to the fact that `también se habla generalmente en español más
ó menos incorrecto, siendo la lengua oficial de la colonia y general de Manila' [more or less
incorrect Spanish is also spoken, being the official language of the colony and generalized in
Manila]. She also referred (e.g. p. 17) to the `broken Spanish' used by many Filipinos, and even
gave an example (p. 135): `¡Calla castila, que corta aquel cabeza tuyo!' [shut up white woman,
or I'll cut off your head]. Studies of contemporary Philippine Spanish by Lipski (1986b, 1987a)
reveal the continued existence of similar structures, which when taken in their totality closely
resemble the PCS dialects in many respects.
The examples just given show that many of the important building blocks which would
coalesce to form Z were present in non-creole varieties of Philippine Spanish, as spoken by
Filipinos and evidently also by Spaniards at times, in order to enhance communication. None of
the examples comes from PCS-speaking communities, but rather provide a cross-section of
usage which, extrapolating backwards only a few decades, could have been found in the
rudimentary knowledge of Spanish shared by Spaniards, Philippine garrison troops, and former
slaves in Zamboanga. These features alone do not suffice to explain all the creoloid traits in Z.
 20

However, in combination with the Philippine common denominators surveyed in the preceding
section, nearly all the major structures of Z can be accounted for without postulating a
transplantation of a functioning PCS speech community to Zamboanga.
In partial summary, it has been proposed that Z did not arise as a radical creole from
purely Spanish roots. Z came into being as residents of Zamboanga, both those of long standing
and new arrivals, enhanced inter-ethnic communicability by drawing ever more heavily on the
one extraterritorial language which had already begun to bridge the gap, namely Spanish. In
Zamboanga, Spanish in its native or quasi-native form was principally the vehicle of some of the
garrison soldiers (especially those from Mexico) and their commanding officers. This would
account for both the phonologically more modern form of many Spanish items in Z and the
noticeably vulgar, barracks-like nature of many of the borrowings. Items derived from earlier
periods of Spanish are probably actually derived from Philippine languages, which began
absorbing Hispanisms as early as the 16th century. During most of the 18th century, the non-
Moslem population of the Zamboanga area was small, and the potential Philippine common
denominators available to early generations of Zamboangueños would be smaller than if only the
intersection of Tagalog and the major Visayan languages is considered. Many of the peripheral
Philippine languages do not share the morphological and lexical similarities which have been
proposed as having contributed to the formation of Z, so that recourse to common Spanish items,
and incorporation of further Hispanisms (presumably including Manila Bay PCS forms carried to
Zamboanga) would be the preferred means of expanding the Z lexicon. During the 19th century,
the ethnic demographics of the Zamboanga area stabilized as piracy in the Sulu Sea was reduced.
During the same period, the presence of native or near-native Spanish speakers in Zamboanga
City reached an all-time high, and Z absorbed most of its newest Spanish lexical items. Ilongo
elements were introduced during this period, which may be explained by the the Cavite-Iloilo-
Zamboanga connection suggested earlier.
The first stage of Z is assumed to have consisted mostly of Spanish items and of only the
broadest Philippine common denominators such as the plural particle mga, interrogative particle
ba, plus a few Ilongo words. Cebuano/Visayan accretions came later. Immigration to
southwestern Mindanao of speakers of central Visayan languages, particularly Cebuano, became
significant towards the end of the 19th century, a population shift rivaled in attested Philippine
history only by the immigration of Tagalog speakers to central Mindanao (including Cotabato
and Davao) as part of a homesteading movement in the 20th century. For the first time since its
inception, Z was placed into contact with a cluster of mutually intelligible Philippine languages,
whose speakers came to exercise a significant economic and social influence in Zamboanga City.
This fact, coupled with the rapid decline in the official Spanish presence, in the number of
Spanish speakers, and in the social desirability of learning Spanish, caused the balance to tip in
favor of Visayan as the source of new lexical items. That the mere presence of a common
Philippine language was not sufficient to induce such lexical incorporation is indicated by the
fact that Zamboanga City has always contained a large number of Tausug speakers, and yet Z
has remained unaffected by Tausug and other languages of the Moslem population.
Although today Z has firmly integrated Visayan elements such as pronouns to such a
degree that these elements appear to have formed part of the original language, they are in fact
more recent accretions. Although use of Philippine pronouns in Z had already begun by the
second half of the 19th century, the consolidation of the new paradigm to the nearly total
exclusion of Spanish competitors (except marginally for bosotros/ustedes) occurred around the
turn of the 20th century, i.e. within living memory of the area's oldest inhabitants. Even within
 21

the last two generations, the further introduction of Visayan elements, and a shift to more
noticeably Visayan patterns of pronunciation, is observable.
To conclude the proposed reconstruction of Z, this language came into existence as an
independent language towards the middle of the 18th century. This language has an especially
rich history of partial relexifications, in a region characterized by multilingual contacts and a
very fluid series of demographic movements. Z began not as a true creole, but as a natural
common intersection of grammatically cognate Philippine languages which had already
incorporated a lexical core of Spanish borrowings. The pool of speakers who provided the
original input for Z did not constitute a single group, but included garrison troops, transients and
later, former slaves recaptured from Moslem territories to the south. Over the period of a century
and a half, Z partially relexified in a number of directions, with each stage of relexification
responding to particular demographic or social events. At least the following stages may be
tentatively proposed, based on direct documentation, indirect reconstruction, and chronological
extrapolation:
STAGE I: (mid 1700's) Z arises in the Zamboanga garrison, as the common intersection
of Spanish-laden Philippine languages.
STAGE II: (mid-late 1700's). Z absorbs grammatical and lexical structures from Manila
Bay PCS, as the Spanish military presence in Zamboanga is consolidated.
Additional migrations of civilians from Cavite have a trickle-down effect on Z.
STAGE III: (1800's ?). Ilongo lexical elements are introduced into Z, possibly as the
result of the use of Iloilo as a stopover for ships bound from Manila to
Zamboanga. Ilongo grammatical forms could have been introduced at this time.
STAGE IV: (most of 1800's). Increasing presence of (civilian) native Spanish speakers
in Zamboanga City results in incorporation of additional Spanish items, with
structural differences between Z and (Philippine) Spanish reaching their alltime
low point.
STAGE V: (Turn of 20th century onward). Large-scale immigration from the central
Visayan region to southwestern Mindanao makes Cebuano Visayan the de facto
number two language in Zamboanga City. Spanish lexical items are increasingly
replaced by Visayan items. Word order begins to shift towards Visayan.
STAGE VI: (1930's onward). Increasing use of English in Zamboanga, not only in
schools but even in casual conversations, results in growing incorporation of
Anglicisms into Z. In the last two generations, this is leading the way to an
eventual relexification of Zamboangueño away from its Hispanic lexical basis.
The reconstructed stages proposed above paint a picture considerably different from `typical'
creole genesis occurring in other parts of the world, and explain the typological differences
between Z and other Spanish-based creoles. This includes word order, use of particles, structure
of the VP and NP, and many other features. Even among the PCS dialects, Z differs
substantially from the Manila Bay PCS dialects, despite the fact that the adstratum Philippine
languages in contact with Z and the Manila Bay PCS dialects are cognate and similar in basic
structure. The difference, as outlined above, lies in the fact that the Manila Bay PCS dialects,
especially T, apparently began life as true creoles, based on a nearly exclusively Spanish input
(possibly with some creole Portuguese contributions), with Philippine elements added only later,
without altering the basic patterns already developed. Z, on the other hand, began life as a
hybrid pan-Philippine contact language whose Spanish items had already been filtered through
 22

Philippine languages, and which was therefore a Philippine language in the structural sense at
every point during its existence.

5. The current status of Chabacano in the Philippines

Chabacano is currently spoken by a small number of elderly individuals in Cavite

(especially the San Roque neighborhood), who may intersperse Chabacano expressions with the
more frequently used Tagalog when speaking amongst themselves. A Circulo Chabacano
informal group has from time to time attempted to revive the language, and church and town
festival bulletins sometimes contains poems or sayings in Chabacano. In Ternate an equally
small number of Ternateño speakers remains, but it appears that the average age of the speakers
is somewhat younger. There is no indication that children in either community are being taught
the language or even have opportunities to hear it. Ermita Chabacano has disappeared, although
a few vestigial speakers undoubtedly remain somewhere in the Metro Manila area. It is in
Zamboanga City and its environs that the Zamboangueño variety of Chabacano makes this the
largest Spanish-derived creole speaking community in the world. In Zamboanga, despite the
lack of official status, Chabacano is the de facto language of choice in nearly all circumstances.
In Zamboanga City, all the radio stations and local television productions broadcast in
Chabacano (with constant code switching and introduction of English words and phrases), with a
few newscasts in English and "public service" announcements in regional languages and
Tagalog, as appropriate. The use of Chabacano in broadcasting is a relatively recent trend, since
as late as ten years ago, most programming was in English (given the lack of acceptance of
Tagalog materials), and it was only after the first experimental Chabacano programs were
received with unequalled enthusiasm that the broadcast media gradually shifted over to this
language. In the schools, English is the official medium of instruction from the outset, with
Pilipino (based on Tagalog) taught as an obligatory subject. Despite official disapproval of halo
halo (i.e. mixed or code switched) speech, in the classroom, most teachers use at least some
Chabacano in presenting lessons, particularly in the lower grades, and also because the English
abilities of many teachers are severely limited; for a general discussion of this type of situation.
During the 1960's and 70's, programs in "vernacular language instruction" were instituted for the
first few grades, and while these have largely been suspended, some rural schools still implement
the Chabacano textual materials, and de facto bilingual instruction is the rule in all public and
many private schools.
Zamboanga City is one of the most thoroughly Hispanized cities remaining in the
Philippines, and at one time, culminating in the first decades of the present century, some form
of the Spanish language circulated rather widely in that city. Several Spanish-language
newspapers were published until World War II, Spanish was used by (Spanish national) priests,
and signs and announcements in Spanish were frequently seen about town. Although the general
feeling among Zamboangueños is that Zamboanga was at least partially Spanish-speaking
towards the end of the Spanish period and in the decades immediately following, it is more
reasonable to suppose that what was really in use by most residents (except for a small group of
Spanish-speaking mestizos) was a partially decreolized Chabacano, with occasional conjugated
verbs, nominal concordance, and a high percentage of recent borrowings from Spanish.
Lexical borrowing into Zamboangueño Chabacano can be divided into four categories:
early Spanish, Visayan, later Spanish, and English. Following the formation of the PCS dialect
of Zamboanga, Visayan words were incorporated in great numbers, replacing original Spanish
words (some of which are still found in the Manila Bay dialects). During the late 19th and early
 23

20th centuries, numerous Spanish words were borrowed or reintroduced into Zamboangueño;
these may be identified by their modern forms (e.g. ahora vs. agora `now,’ antes `before’ vs.
endenantes `earlier in the same day’;both forms are current in Zamboangueño) and/or modern
semantic value (auto `automobile,’ aeroplano `airplane,’ aeropuerto `airport’). The most telling
modern Hispanisms are the words español and castellano, which replace castila (< Sp.
Castilla/castellano) for both the Spanish language and Spaniards; the latter term is found
vestigially in the Manila Bay PCS dialects, and is not unknown to the oldest Zamboangueños.
However, at least some of the Visayan elements in Zamboangueño appear to be of late
19th or early 20th century origin, since the Spanish forms are still found among the oldest, rural
residents of Zamboanga, and also in Cotabato Chabacano; examples include chiquito vs. diutay
`small,’ hijo-hija vs. anak `son/daughter,’ niño vs. bata `small child,’ nieto vs. apó `grandchild.’
More recently, the predominant source of lexical borrowing has become English, as in all other
Philippine languages; not only are individual words borrowed, but entire expressions may be
introduced into Chabacano speech, and among those speakers reasonably fluent in English, code
switching is common. Nouns and some verbs may simply be given a Chabacano form, much as
occurs in bilingual Spanish/English speech in the United States: sacrificiá `sacrifice’ (Sp.
sacrificar); compositá `compose’ (Sp. componer); dependable `dependable’ (Sp. confiable);
dolyar `dollar’ (Sp. dólar); valuable `valuable’ (Sp. valioso); serioso `serious’ (Sp. serio);
preliminario `preliminary’ (Sp. preliminar), etc. These loan translations may arise
spontaneously, in a conversation or a radio program, or may be widely used by large segments of
the population. Chabacano also makes extensive use of the Visayan prefix man-; originally this
prefix formed verbs from Spanish and Visayan nouns (man-cuento `to chat’; man-encuentro `to
meet’; man-ulan `to rain’; man-gulu `to make trouble’), but currently, any English word or
expression (not necessarily a noun) may be converted into a Chabacano verb by means of this
prefix: man-relax, man-takeover, man-kidnap, man-turnover, man-public service (`make a
public service announcement’). This is an active process and any English word may be used,
even when equivalent Chabacano words are readily available.
Active borrowing from Spanish has ceased in Zamboangueño, due to the lack of a pool of
Spanish speakers. However, the current linguistic perspective of Zamboanga presents two
interesting facets with respect to the Spanish-Chabacano interface. The first consists of the
significant alternation between normally evolved Chabacano forms (including well-integrated
borrowings from Visayan and English) and more or less standard Spanish equivalents. The
second is a largely overlooked inclination toward the continued introduction of Spanish forms,
noticeable despite lack of bilingual contact with the Spanish language.
The occurrence of modern or metropolitan Spanish forms instead of evolved PCS forms
in contemporary Zamboangueño stems from one of three sources: (1) preservation of Spanish
forms since the formative period of PCS; (2) introduction of Spanish forms during the last period
of Spanish influence in Zamboanga; (3) conscious or semiconscious introduction of Spanish
elements during the contemporary period, spurred by a desire to "preserve," "purify,"
"standardize" or "enrich" Zamboangueño.
(1) PRESERVATION OF ORIGINAL SPANISH FORMS. Only a few Spanish words survived the
creolization process totally unchanged; these include some adjectives which have retained
gender inflection and which, given their existence even in the isolated Ternateño dialect and also
in Caviteño, have probably been used in this fashion all along: bonito/a `pretty’; guapo/a `good
looking,’ etc. Some masculine/feminine noun pairs also occur, such as maestro/a `teacher,’
viudo/a `widower/widow,’ cocinero/a `cook,’ difunto/a `dead person,’ etc. Some Chabacano
 24

plural nouns appear to have retained the Spanish plural /s/, usually in conjunction with the plural
particle mga: vecinos `neighbors,’ barcadas `friends.
(2) LATER SPANISH INTRODUCTIONS. The more recent Spanish presence in Zamboanga
was significant in altering the Zamboangueño dialect, although little true decreolization took
place. In particular, none of the essential Chabacano syntactic structures was modified, and
Spanish gender and number concordance was not reestablished except in isolated lexical items
which do not form part of an integrated system.
(3) CONTEMPORARY SPANISH INTRODUCTIONS. In a number of cases, the current
Zamboangueño dialect exhibits alternation between normal Chabacano forms and Spanish
variants, with the latter deriving in all probability from the most recent contacts with the Spanish
language. This includes use of `conjugated’ verb forms (e.g tenemos [Ch. tiene kita/kame] `we
have’; digo [Ch. ta ablá yo] `I mean’; nose or nosay < Sp. no sé `I don't know’); fossilized
forms derived from Spanish conjugated verbs (puede ser [Ch. Siguro] `it may be’; como se llama
[Ch. cosa ta llamá/quimodo ta ablá] `what is it called/how does one say’); Spanish gerund
forms, normally absent in the PCS dialects (continuando kitá `as we are continuing [moving
right along]’); use of Spanish plural subject pronouns ustedes and vosotros.
The linguistic influence of school teachers on the Chabacano language is more diffuse
and difficult to trace, but is nonetheless a potent force. Education in Zamboanga has normally
been carried out via English as the sole official medium of instruction, although in practice
teachers have been forced to use the Zamboangueño dialect extensively. When the "vernacular
language education" policies were implemented in the 1960's and early 1970's, the urgent need
was felt not only for beginning-level text materials, which could be easily written locally, but for
a sense of Chabacano grammar, structure, and usage, in the face of the widespread belief that
"Chabacano has no grammar." Several teachers produced original grammatical materials (e. g.
Apostol 1967), which, like so many first-time creole "grammars," organized the materials
following traditional Spanish grammar. The latter work also enjoined teachers and students to
use "good" language, and the same author wrote a weekly column on the Chabacano language in
a now defunct local newspaper (Apostol 1963-7), containing grammatical explanations,
comments on individual words, the admonition to use "proper" language, and examples of
"incorrect" usage. A group of perhaps a dozen influential teachers offered impromptu and
informal comments on Chabacano grammar to at least two generations of Zamboangueños, and
nearly the entirety of the current intellectual community and media personalities of Zamboanga
City are alumni of one or more of these venerable ladies. These teachers provided an
educational continuity across large segments of the city's population, and their
Spanish-influenced concepts of Chabacano grammar (although few of them are truly fluent in
Spanish) continue to be felt among younger teachers, journalists and radio announcers.
The latter group, particularly radio personalities (since little Chabacano is used in the
newspapers) are extremely influential, given their high visibility in a city where nearly all
residents listen to the three major radio stations, which broadcast predominantly in Chabacano.
In addition to the usual programs of news (English and Chabacano), musical dedications and
public service announcements, the Zamboanga radio stations host a large number of talk shows
and commentaries, whose announcers and protagonists enjoy great popularity. Several of these
individuals profess an interest in the conservation of the Chabacano language, and consciously or
unconsciously introduce Spanish elements into the program language, in higher proportions than
in everyday spoken Zamboangueño. For example, the use of tenemos, digo, cualquiera (Ch.
maskín) `whatever,’ pequeño (Ch. diutay) `small,’ largámono (Ch. anda/larga ya kitá) `let's go,’
 25

noh vamos pa otro public service (Ch. tiene kitá ...) `let's go to another public service
announcement,’ etc. are found almost exclusively in the speech of radio announcers, many of
whom also use these forms in their off-the-air speech, perhaps through having formed the habit.
The high frequency of use of vosotros instead of ustedes or kamó as the 2nd person plural subject
pronoun is also characteristic of radio speech, as is the free alternation between vosotros and
ustedes in the course of a single conversation. As part of each broadcast, news items and
newspaper clippings are read in English, then successively `translated’ or `interpreted’ into
Chabacano. For these purposes, the announcers frequently improvize, invent words and stretch
the semantic value of other words. The overall effect is a markedly Hispanic flavor for the
neologisms required for adequate translation of news items. Another popular format among the
Zamboanga stations involves the `anchorman’ in the studio and a group of `mobiles,’ roving
reporters with walkie-talkies who report from strategic points. In between news items, the
announcers frequenly comment on language usage, usually on something one of them has just
said, and whereas this commentary is non-scholarly and often non-serious, the totality of such
remarks not only indicates awareness of language usage among Zamboangueños, but also the
potential for a small nucleus of radio announcers to project their personal views across a large
audience, which includes not only rural and city workers, but also all of the city's influential
figures.
In Zamboanga City and its environs, nearly all local-level politicians come from the
region, and speak Chabacano as a first or strong second language. Even those political figures
who have emigrated from other areas of the Philippines feel the need to learn and use Chabacano
as they carry out their job, particularly at the neighborhood unit (barangay) level. Public
speeches by higher-ranking political figures are made in English when prominent
non-Zamboangueños may be expected to be in the audience; however, for maximum effect,
especially during political campaigns, Chabacano is the language in which speeches and
exhortations are made. In Zamboanga City the presence of non-Chabacano speaking national
government and military officials in the public spotlight highlights the incipient nationalist
feelings of Zamboangueños, and any government official who addresses an audience in
Chabacano is assured of the loyalty of significant sectors of the population. Naturally, the
language usage of these political figures is not lost on the audience, given that the region is
dominated by political personalism, preference for charismatic leaders over abstract ideologies,
and a strong sense of regional loyalty. Being aware of the impact not only of their political
message but also of the language in which this message is couched, Zamboanga politicians often
strive to purify their Chabacano, avoiding unassimilated Anglicisms, and reaching for
"authentic" sounding Chabacano equivalents. These often approximate or are identical to the
equivalent Spanish forms, thereby reflecting the influence of the school teachers, the impact of
Spanish- and Chabacano-speaking clergy, and the prominence of Chabacano language and
commentary in the public media.

6. Attitudes towards Chabacano

The status of Chabacano in the Philippines is intimately related to issues of identity and
attitude toward a language which does not fit clearly into the category of `native’ Philippine
language or `foreign colonial’ language. In Cavite, the remaining Chabacano speakers use the
language only infrequently, and bring a sense of nostalgia and sometimes pride to the occasional
incursions in Chabacano, all the while laughing inwardly at this `jargon’ which they have been
told is just corrupt Spanish. In Zamboanga, where Chabacano is the first and sometimes only
 26

language several hundred thousand speakers, awareness and attitudes are more highly developed,
but the fundamental paradoxes surrounding the status and use of a hybrid creole language
remain.
In addition to the ambiguity surrounding the status of Chabacano as varieties or `dialects'
of Spanish as opposed to true creole languages, Chabacano-speaking communities have to
contend with the widespread notion—most prevalent among the very speakers themselves—that
Chabacano has `no grammar.' In my fieldwork in Cavite and especially Zamboanga, this
comment was frequently made to me, half-jokingly, by community residents amused and
perplexed by my interest in this `non-language.' Nuay [kamé] gramática `we have/there is no
grammar' I was constantly informed in Zamboanga, while many Chabacano speakers in Cavite
informed me that Chabacano was `broken Spanish' and tried their best to speak in `real' or `good'
Spanish. Interestingly enough, particularly in Zamboanga, the notion that Chabacano has `no
grammar' is not necessarily a source of shame or reluctance to use what for many speakers is
their sole or principal native language. Rather it stems from the dual notion that a language
without a grammar either cannot be learned by an outsider (especially a trained scholar), who
must naturally be familiar only with languages possessing a `grammar,' or that by simply
speaking `broken Spanish' or even `proper Spanish' to Chabacano speakers the outsider can
achieve perfect communication and ultimate mastery of the language. In fact, the very worst
learners of Chabacano are fluent Spanish speakers who assume that by making slight
adjustments to their Spanish or by using stereotypical `foreigner talk' or even `baby' talk—
exemplifying the still active stigma of `kitchen Spanish' or `bamboo Spanish' they are in fact
speaking Chabacano. It is instructive to note that the United States Peace Corps has provided
extensive training materials in (Zamboanga) Chabacano, which is referred to as simply
`Chabacano.' No reference is made to the obvious similarities to Spanish, and a non-Spanish
orthography is used whenever feasible. I witnessed the Peace Corps' training efforts in Manila
and subsequently observed numerous volunteers using Zamboanga Chabacano in the field, in
remote rural villages where no Spanish was spoken or understood. Spanish priests living in
Chabacano-speaking parishes quickly learn that no form of Spanish will produce effective
communication, although many citizens, particularly in Zamboanga City, attempt to speak what
they believe is `Spanish' when addressing a Spanish priest. The two Bibles available in
(Zamboanga) Chabacano, one produced by the Catholic church and the other by the Summer
Institute of Linguistics, both refer to the language only as `Chabacano'; the Catholic translation is
more literary and uses more Spanish-derived elements not commonly used in the community,
while the SIL version is vernacular in the extreme, and has caused some consternation among
parishoners accustomed to reading the Bible in Spanish or English (albeit frequently
understanding little of either language). For many Chabacano speakers, `no grammar' means in
effect no written grammar books, and no tradition of writing or formal instruction in any of the
Chabacano varieties. When Chabacano has been written in the Philippines, it has usually been in
literary works where uncouth or provincial speakers are portrayed, or in newspaper columns
devoted to quaint topics. Much the same is true of, e.g. written Pidgin English in West Africa,
Abidjan vernacular French in the Ivory Coast, and English-based creoles in such nations as
Jamaica, Guyana, and the Lesser Antilles. Chabacano speakers are so used to the notion that
their language has no grammar that they were often perplexed and sometimes pleasantly
surprised when my attempts to elicit particular constructions or facts elicited sharp grammatical
judgments, including configurations which are completely unacceptable in Chabacano. When I
pointed out to some of my Chabacano-speaking friends that these acceptability judgments
 27

demonstrate that their language indeed has a grammar, I was met with polite amusement, but
sometimes also with a budding reevaluation of their language. This was particularly when
meeting with secondary and university students and teachers, who had more developed (although
not always accurate) notions about language.
A concomitant to the notion that Chabacano has `no grammar’ is the belief that any
Chabacano speaker can completely understand Spanish, and that perhaps only laziness and lack
of practice prevents Zamboangueños from speaking `real’ Spanish; at the same time, it is
supposed that any native Spanish speaker can immediately and flawlessly understand and use
Chabacano, simply by `degrading’ his own Spanish. On-the-spot observation and
experimentation reveals all these suppositions to be essentially false. Most younger
Zamboangueños are thoroughly baffled by a conversation attempted entirely in Spanish (as I
demonstrated on numerous occasions), and even the oldest community members, who received
some training in the Spanish language and/or recall the time when more Spanish speakers were
to be found in Zamboanga, experience severe difficulties with Spanish grammar, although the
majority of individual words are correctly identified. In the schools (where two years of Spanish
are still obligatory at the secondary level), many Chabacano-speaking students receive poor
grades in Spanish, since while they can grasp the meaning of most sentences, they resist learning
grammatical patterns, preferring to rely on their native intuitions and the feeling that no essential
differences exist between the two languages. Their attitudes toward learning Spanish are quite
ambivalent; they feel attracted to the language because of its obvious linguistic affinities with
Chabacano, but at the same time they share the feeling, widespread across the Philippines, that
the third national language should be removed entirely from the school curriculum, as a useless
anachronism.
For newly-arrived Spanish speakers unaccustomed to Philippine language structures and
vocabulary (and/or with no linguistic training), Chabacano is overwhelmingly odd (as may be
easily demonstrated by playing tapes to Spanish speakers from other countries), and depending
upon the colloquial level and choice of lexical items, may not even be recognized as a Spanish
derivative. Whereas the Spanish speaker has a significant advantage in learning Chabacano over
native Philippine languages, attitudinal questions often produce paradoxical results, in that
individuals (for example, from other areas of the Philippines) knowing no Spanish more
effectively learn Chabacano, as simply a regional Philippine language.
. Among Zamboangueños themselves, feelings are split as regards the current state of
Chabacano, the importance of exercising some control over its evolution, and its future
prospects. The first group, which has been identified with the conscious and unconscious
introduction or preservation of Hispanisms, feels that the Zamboangueño dialect is losing its
purity, becoming contaminated by English and to a lesser extent by Visayan; they believe that
unless corrective measures are taken, Chabacano will degenerate into a hopeless halo halo,
which while containing elements of many languages, will be completely unintelligible to
speakers of English, Visayan, Spanish and `legitimate’ Zamboangueño. The recommended
corrective actions include wider use of Chabacano in the public domain, and above all, a
normalizing effort, the writing and use of grammatical treatises, and (usually hinted at only
implicitly), free access to the Spanish lexicon as a source of new borrowings into Chabacano.
The second group takes a more laissez faire attitude, feeling that the Zamboangueño dialect is by
definition whatever its speakers make of it; they accept the incorporation of English and Visayan
elements and do not have strong feelings in favor of normalization or even the written use of
Chabacano. Given their feelings, the second group believes that the Chabacano language will
 28

exist as long as the Zamboangueños themselves do, and is not perturbed about partial or total
loss of intelligibility across a gap of several generations, or with putative mutual intelligibility
with Spanish or other languages. This group as a whole knows little or no Spanish, and does not
regard the incorporation of Spanish words into the modern Zamboangueño dialect as a truly
desirable process, often thinking of Spanish as the language of `old-timers’ or at least
`old-fashioned’ people.
Despite the existence of two relatively well-defined sets of attitudes as regards
Chabacano usage in Zamboanga, it is difficult to classify the types of individuals associated with
each group. It would be simplistic to assert that the `Hispanic/puristic’ position is held only by
older residents, while younger people tend to regard the linguistic question with indifference;
however, the first position does represent a conscious awareness of language usage, arrived at
through observation and experience, while the latter viewpoint is most often simple disinterest
rather than an active `hands-off’ posture. In this dimension, then, one finds a higher percentage
of proponents of Chabacano usage and standardization among older residents, who have
survived the winds of change that brought English and then Tagalog into Zamboanga life; some
of the oldest even recall the final days of the Spanish period. At the same time, there is a definite
bifurcation along intellectual lines, since the `pure’ Chabacano position is largely favored by
those persons with some academic or professional training; among the lower working classes,
vague attitudes about language usage may exist, but these are rarely articulated in specific terms.
Finally, it is possible to discern a correlation with political and social ideology, in that
individuals who favor increased political autonomy for Zamboanga together with recognition of
regional ethnic features often express resentment at the dilution of Chabacano by English and
Philippine languages. Since each parameter divides the population of Zamboanga along
different lines, the relative importance of each factor at an individual level determines the
attitude of each person toward Chabacano usage. Moreover, there are numerous exceptions to
the above-mentioned cases, given the multiethnic and politically volatile environment of
Zamboanga, so that only general trends may be established; clearly, potential for influencing
language usage is not equivalent to pro-Hispanic attitudes, since not all influential
Zamboangueños favor such positions, or even profess specific viewpoints on language usage.

7. Conclusions

As linguistic awareness continues to grow in the Philippines, and as the scientific study
of Philippine languages takes on a more international perspective, the Chabacano varieties are
gradually emerging as legitimate objects of serious inquiry. Taken together, the Chabacano
dialects enjoy nearly 350 years of shared history in the Philippines, and are as authentically
`Philippine’ languages as those brought to the islands by much earlier migrations. Rather than
debris left over from unsuccessful language encounters in colonial times, Chabacano is the
product of a rich cross-fertilization that could only have occurred in a region in which both great
linguistic diversity and considerable overlapping areal features predominated. Chabacano is a
manifestation of linguistic and cultural resilience, a language which continues to grow in number
of speakers and sociopolitical impact. The focus on Chabacano by this forum underscores the
importance of this unique language, whose hybrid genealogy—a common feature of all
creoles—is a source of strength and coherence in a nation whose strength rests precisely on
coherence in the midst of diversity.
 29

Notes
1
An essential minimal bibliography of Chabacano and Philippine non-creole Spanish
would include the following: Argüelles (1964), Barón Castro (1965), Batalha (1960), Batausa
(1969), Blumentritt (1884), Camins (1989), Cuartocruz (1992), Domingo (1967), Evangelista
(1972), Frake (1971, 1980), Forman (1972), Germán (1932, 1984), Giese (1963), Gonzalez
(1967), Ing (1968), Knowlton (1968), Lipski (1986a, 1986b, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1992, 1996,
1999), Llamado (1969, 1972), Macnasantos (1971), Maño (1963), McKaughan (1954), Miranda
(1956), Molony (1973, 1977a, 1977b), Nigoza (1985), Palacios (1951), Quilis (1970, 1975,
1980, 1984, 1985, 1992), Retana (1921), Riego de Dios (1976a, 1976b, 1978, 1989), Santos y
Gomez (1924), Taylor (1957), Tirona (1924), Verdín Díaz (1964), Whinnom (1954, 1956, 1965).
 30

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