Philippine E-Journals

Phonological Variation in Chabacano de Zamboanga Among Rural and Urban Areas

Reynante I. Enriquez | Lourdes Dayot | Julieta D. Francisco

Discipline: Education

 

Abstract:

The current piece of sociophonetic research is a study of phonological variation on (vowels) in Chabacano de Zamboanga, an extinct-variant of Spanish-lexified creole language spoken in the Zamboanga Peninsula conducted among rural and urban barangay speakers. Based on variationist sociolinguistics and language contact theory, this study investigated geographical variation in vowel production as an index of social change and cultural affiliation. The participants consisted of 162 native speakers of Chabacano, aged 50–80, who were purposively selected from 26 barangays. These barangays represented both rural and urban areas, as well as communities within and outside Zamboanga City, with equitable representation in terms of gender. Elicitation took place in a field station and was conducted using structured tasks: informants were given a 200-word wordlist targeting vowel variation. Transcriptions Notes were orthographically and phonetically transcribed, and analyses were performed in Praat and SPSS 27. The post hoc analysis showed that there were significant differences between the words of 45 out of 46 pairs (p < 0.05), showing a high amount of vowel variation. There are conservative haplographies of those in rural dialects (e.g., oscuro, kanamon, bonita) and innovative vowel shifts in urban ones (e.g., iscuro, kunamon, bunita), favored by contact with the Philippine languages like Cebuano or Tagalog. These results confirm studies on other creoles which have identified urban centers as sites of change in a language. The study has implications for language preservation, heritage language teaching and curriculum development; it advocates community-based documentation, youth participation, acoustic analysis and corpus methods for the continued sustainability of Chabacano.