Palalambiton (Utterances): Revitalization and Preservation of Hiligaynon Language

Hiligaynon Language

Abstract

Hiligaynon language is unique that keeps key attributes that natives can identify as distinct from other Philippine languages. Embajador (2019) cited that the Hiligaynon language is very rich and represents the authenticity and identity of the culture. Even research and documentation identify additional unique features of Hiligaynon, which accurately might linguistically describe and analyze (Casperson, 2010). Thus, this study inspires the premise of Casperson to describe and analyze the distinct features of the Hiligaynon language. The corpora of the study were epiko (epic), komposo (original composition of music), daigon (Christmas song), ambahanon (song), and binalaybay (poem) in Hiligaynon, which focused on the micro levels of analysis. Specifically, the linguistic markers that emerged in the corpora serve as a basis for categorization, description, and interpretation in eagerness to preserve the indigenous Hiligaynon words. The findings were the lexical items as particles showed 394 times in the corpora. The lexical particle, 'agud,' is a lexical-grammatical feature that emerged in the corpora syntactically functioned as part of intra-sentence relators - conjunction joining convergent conditions, or in English grammar as the conjunction. At the same time, the descriptive lexical items were revealed 107 times in the corpora. The lexical descriptive, 'ka,' is also a lexical-grammatical feature that emerged, which functioned as a phrase ligature syntactically. In English grammar, it is a proposition; if it is a pronoun, ‘ka’ is succeeded by a noun. Out of 116 partially selected indigenous Hiligaynon words, there were 111 words included in the final list. The Hiligaynon words suggest putting in a database of Hiligaynon corpus to use by other researchers and future studies. This study is also an additional teaching material in Philippine Literature and MTB-MLE.