Central Tagbanwa: A Philippine language on the brink of extinction (review)

Central Tagbanwa (CT) is one of three mutually unintelligible Tagbanwa languages; the other two are Aborlan Tagbanwa and Calamian Tagbanwa. The languages are spoken in the western Philippines in Central and Northern Palawan, and on the Calamian Islands.

The announced purpose of Central Tagbanwa is to describe the decline of CT since World War II and to document the language linguistically. The book contains five chapters, and the three appendices provide twenty pages of textual material, one of which is a ten-page conversation.

Chs. 1 (‘Historical background’) and 2 (‘Sociolinguistic dynamics’) address Scebold’s first goal. These chapters briefly describe the external history of the Tagbanwas and present data from S’s sociolinguistic surveys. The major observations are (i) ‘it was the huge in-migration of Filipinos from other islands after World War Two that precipitated the language shift we see today’ (2), and (ii) ‘there were probably less than 300 adults who competently spoke Tagbanwa in 1992, one-third of whom have probably passed away since then’ (23).

Chs. 3 (‘Phonology’), 4 (‘Grammar’), and 5 (‘A brief lexicon’) embody the linguistic description. Ch. 3 presents the phonological inventory of CT in twelve pages. Both the consonants and vowels constitute an unremarkable Philippine phonological system.

Ch. 4 on grammar is the longest in the book and has several sections: morphology, lexical categories, noun phrase, predications, and semantic relations. S advises that the chapter ‘should not be considered a full treatment of Central Tagbanwa grammar’ (41), and it is not. Noticeably, there is no section on syntax as such, and noun phrases are described in two-plus pages. The section on lexical categories contains the description of the CT determiners and the focus system (in the usage of Philippine linguistics). It is interesting that CT (in this description) has only two contrasting focuses, an agent focus and a nonagent focus, which is amplified by a cross-cutting opposition of three aspects: not begun, incompletive, and completive (50). The expected complement of Philippine verbal affixes is present and attributed to either the agent of nonagent focus as ‘aspectual components’ (52). These are not the three ‘aspects’ noted above since each may have a not begun, an incompletive, and/or a completive form. The aspectual components include the abilitative (agent focus, e.g. maka-), potential (both agent, e.g. ma-, and nonagent, ma- -an), generality (agent, e.g. maN-), participatory (agent, e.g. mamag-), participatory/generality (agent, e.g. namaN-), opportunity (agent, e.g. makapag-), and involuntary (agent, e.g. magka-). The section on predications distinguishes between nonverbal clauses that ‘follow the comment-topic pattern found also in Tagalog’ (63) and verbal clauses. The latter are described taxonomically by illustrating the sorts of possible verbs and clausal expansions. Nothing is said about the semantics of word order, and the terms ‘focus’ (in the broader non-Philippine usage) and ‘topic’ do not appear. The section on semantic relations itemizes and illustrates inter-clausal connections, for example, contrafactual.

Given the author’s limited goals, the book succeeds. Using a technique of an illustrated taxonomy, it provides essential orientation to the language in the broader context of Philippine languages.