Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary

9. Lexicography and the description of Philippine English vocabulary

9 Lexicography and the description of Philippine English vocabulary Kingsley Bolton and Susan Butler Introduction This chapter considers a range of issues related to the study of Philippine English vocabulary, including the importance of dictionaries in the legitimation of world Englishes, the description of lexical innovations, and the historical development and codification of the Philippine English lexicon. Historical sources show that Filipino words began to be borrowed into the English of the American colonizers at a very early stage in the colonial period. Today, the English used in the Philippines has a distinctive localized vocabulary which finds expression in a range of settings, including government, education, and the media as well as the personal domain. As yet, however, no comprehensive dictionary of Philippine English has been compiled, and those dictionaries with most authority remain the various editions of MerriamWebster ’s, whose inclusion of a Philippine lexicon is largely limited to a colonial inventory of the tribes and products of the Philippine Islands dating from the early twentieth century. Despite the mechanisms of language contact and lexical innovation that characterize the creative, hybrid, and innovative cadences of contemporary Philippine English, major reference dictionaries, particularly the Merriam-Webster, have institutionalized a petrified lexicon of Philippine vocabulary derived from an era of American anthropology concerned with the study and classification of the native population. Recent attempts to promote dictionaries with a more authentic coverage of contemporary Philippine English vocabulary have been well-received, but have failed to gain a wide following. This failure may in part be explained by the broader history of the lexicography of Philippine languages, which dates from the sixteenth century, as well as a consideration of the sociolinguistic realities of the present. 176 Kingsley Bolton and Susan Butler Describing the vocabulary of new Englishes In the academic literature on world Englishes, a number of linguists have focused on the importance of the early contact period in contributing to the distinctiveness of the ‘new Englishes’ that have been established worldwide since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the case of the United States, Mencken (1919) in his The American Language provides a chronological account of American English that was largely motivated by his desire to demonstrate the autonomy and distinctiveness of the variety in comparison with the English of Britain. Much of his argumentation focuses on the contributions of successive waves of European immigrants in the New World, but he also makes the point that the initial phases of settlement were also important in contributing to the distinctiveness of this new American language, so that ‘the earliest Americanisms were probably words borrowed bodily from the Indian languages — words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England’ ([1919] 1937). Turner (1994), in The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume V, notes that the distinctiveness of Australian English has its origins in processes of dialect leveling that occurred in the first convict settlements, and that: The vocabulary of the language grew by borrowing from Aboriginal languages or by retaining or borrowing from English dialects, by extending the reference of existing resources or by conjoining existing elements in compounds or set phrases. The controlling force in directing the actual development of the language from these potential sources was the social experience of the inhabitants of Australia. (Turner 1994: 277) In his account of the history of Australian English, Turner devotes fully half his chapter to a discussion of Australian English vocabulary. In this context, the history of the lexicon is explained with reference to such geographical, linguistic, and sociohistorical influences as the ‘discovery’ of Australia, Aboriginal languages, the convict settlements, climate, geography, agriculture, and gold-mining, as well as the development of ‘modern’ Australian social institutions. In another article by Bauer (1994) in the same volume, the importance of vocabulary in New Zealand English is also noted, and in the section of the chapter dealing with vocabulary, Bauer discusses a large number of influences, including Maori, British dialect words, Australianisms, changes of meaning, and New Zealand coinages. Again, Bauer emphasizes the importance of the early period of settlement in the formation of a distinct variety of New Zealand English. Similar patterns of cultural and linguistic contact may be identified in the formation of other Englishes, even in those societies where English has traditionally been regarded as a second language, or ‘outer-circle’ variety. In Lexicography and the description of Philippine English vocabulary 177 the case of...