Abstract
Following Williams’s (1976) seminal work on cultural keywords in English, other language researchers have embraced the term, applying different methodologies (both qualitative and quantitative) to identifying them. They find sets of keywords (larger and smaller) in British, Australian, and South Asian Englishes, using synchronic rather than diachronic approaches to identifying them. This chapter uses diachronic evidence to demonstrate the durability of some Philippine cultural keywords through major historical and language changes in the speech community. It uses early and modern lexical records to document a set of 20 words that survive from the Spanish colonial regime, were taken up into Tagalog, and thence transferred into C20 Philippine English. These Spanish-derived keywords (e.g. poblacion, sala, mestizo, lola) are culture-specific in representing and reflecting profound social changes in the Philippines, as seen in their usage in data from the GloWbE corpus (Global Web-based English, 2012). They illustrate the legacy from Spanish colonialism present in C21 Philippine English: cultural keywords continuing in various socio-semantic fields.
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Notes
- 1.
For details of these semantic fields (USAS), see Piao et al. (2005).
- 2.
This is one of the varieties of English included in the Varieties of English in the Indo-Pacific (VEIP) research network, of which Professor Kate Burridge and I are co-directors.
- 3.
Hokaglish is a mixed language, drawing elements from Hokkien Chinese, Tagalog, and English (Gonzalez 2017).
- 4.
The original name for the national language, Pilipino, reflected the phonology of Tagalog, which lacks the /f/ phoneme and other dental fricatives. The official name change to Filipino was intended to recommend it to non-Tagalog speakers in the middle and southern islands of the Philippines.
- 5.
Similar singular and plural uses of rupee have been found as a high-frequency keyword of Indian English (Peters f.c.2021).
- 6.
Its Mexican-Spanish origins are noted in the Anvil Dictionary. The Philippines were governed from Mexico under the viceroyalty of New Spain (not Spain itself), and closely connected with Mexico through the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade from 1565 on.
- 7.
Kamote is the more common spelling in GloWbE data, reflecting the word’s passage from Spanish camote into Tagalog. Compare the Philippinization of other Spanish loanwords discussed in Sect. 13.2.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my colleague Dr. Loy Lising, who introduced me to Philippine English and its resources. Another fruit of this collaboration is Lising et al. (2020).
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Peters, P. (2020). Cultural Keywords in Philippine English. In: Allan, K. (eds) Dynamics of Language Changes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_13
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