Philippine E-Journals

Linguistic Similarities in Cavite and Zamboanga Chabacano Lexicon

Bobby M. Cabangon

Discipline: Language Arts, Discipline

 

Abstract:

The study aimed to determine the linguistic similarities and phonologicalchanges in Cavite and Zamboanga Chabacano lexicon through the qualitativeresearch design utilizing the manifest content analysis. Based on the availability of Zamboanga Chabacano lexical equivalents (Camins, 1999), thestudy selected 2,126 lexical items from the total lexical entry of about 16,000found in Chabacano- Cavite’s Dialect (Chabacano Glossary, n.d.) and in theSwadesh List of English words (Swadesh, 1971). The alphabetically-arranged lexical entries put in tabular form were analyzed by the use of thematiccoding and alphabetical clustering. Results revealed that out of the 2,126 Catalina P. Martinez Zamboanga State College of Marine Sciences and Technology.

 

Cavite and Zamboanga Chabacano lexical items understudy, 1,475 (69.38%)are similar, 514 (24.18%) are different in terms of vowel shift, assimilation/dissimilation and epenthesis/aphesis. However, the remaining 140 (6.59 %)lexical items were classified “Others” as they did not fall under any of thelexical categories covered. Adding the percentage of lexical similarity with thepercentage of lexical entries with phonological changes, the data revealed93.56% of the total lexicon that are relatively similar. This is above the 85%benchmark set by Rench and Casad (1992) as the basis for concluding thattwo languages come from one linguistic tree. The study concluded that Cavite and Zamboanga Chabacano came from the same source which is Spanish.With these data, an English, Spanish, Cavite and Zamboanga Chabacano Dictionary can be published. This would provide not only a data base but alsoimportant information for linguists and other language specialists who wantto study evolving and dying languages.