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
