Monday, January 15, 2018

Ngani? Mandin naman! Wikang Marinduque pa more! (Marinduque 'patwa')

Resulta ng larawan para sa marinduque rising

Marinduque Patois 

Marinduque is less than 100 miles from Manila as the crow flies, or about a day-long trip if, you take the RoRo in Lucena. This is by way of car Manila via SLEX, then the Friendship Highway to Lucena and on to Dalahican Port. The ship weighs anchor at either Balanacan Port, Mogpog; Buyabod Port, Santa Cruz; or Masiga Pier, Gasan, town where the airport is also located.

Yet for all its closeness, Marinduque Tagalog (MT) seems dissimilar to Luzon Tagalog (LT) in intonation, grammar, and words.

Dr. Rosa Pelaez Soberano's informative and scholarly study on the island-province's funny-sounding jargon entitled "The dialects of Marinduque Tagalog," puts the proper perspective in this seeming conundrum; why is MT so unlike LT although the two areas are near each other.

The version of Tagalog spoken in Marinduque has been described as "the root from which modern national forms of speech have sprung," where remnants of archaic Tagalog can be found, spoken in a lilting manner by its inhabitants. If this linguistic theory is accurate, Marinduque's Tagalog has contributed significantly to the development of the official Philippine national language, according to Wikipedia.

It added that to this day, Marinduqueños speak an old variation of the Tagalog language that is very close to the way Tagalog was spoken before the Spanish colonization. According to language experts, the Tagalog dialects of Marinduque are the most divergent, especially the Eastern Marinduque dialect, perhaps due to the relative isolation from the Tagalogs of Luzon and also perhaps due to the influence of the Visayan and Bicol migrants.

Linguist Christopher Sundita observed that some of the affixes in Marinduque Tagalog, particularly "a-" and "ina-," are affixes used in Asi (Bantoanon), a Visaya language spoken in Romblon, just south of Marinduque. Example: "a-patayin ta," (I will kill you), pronounced with an ascending pitch, or "ina-biro mo wari ako," (It seems you are kidding me).

Marinduque Tagalog, like the Tagalog spoken over two centuries ago, had an additional verb category, the imperative, which was used for commands and requests (e.g., Matulog ka na - Go to sleep).

Wikipedia says that "even then, the imperative and the infinitive were used side by side in expressing commands; but in standard Tagalog, apparently the infinitive became used exclusively. And in the Eastern Marinduque dialect, the imperative affixes are very much alive."

One has to hear the Marinduque Tagalog spoken to appreciate what this means. Or, to follow Soberano's example, by reading some of the 300-item list of words she compiled, along with guide to their pronunciation in order to hear or feel the resonant sound of the natives.

According to Soberano, the Tagalog dialects of Marinduque are more similar to each other than they are to Manila Tagalog.


"When a native of Marinduqe speaks, another native listener can readily tell the dialect area from which the speaker hails. His speech is marked by a characteristic intonation, the presence or absence of non-phrase-final glottal stop, a few items of different vocabulary and morphological structures." - Manila Bulletin, December 6, 2012