The Bantayanon language is the

regional language * A regional language is a language spoken in a region of a sovereign state, whether it be a small area, a federated state or province or some wider area. Internationally, for the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority La ...

of the Bantayan islands in the

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. It is a part of the Bisayan language family and is closely related to Waray and Hiligaynon. There are three dialects of Bantayanon, based in the three municipalities that comprise the island group: ''Binantayanun'' (in Bantayan), ''Linawisanun'' (in Madridejos), and ''Sinantapihanun'' (in Santa Fe), the most idiosyncratic of the three. There are also significant dialectal differences between the speech patterns of those that live in the town centers and those that live outside of the more rural areas of the islands.

History of the Bantayanon language

The first mention of the language spoken on the Bantayan islands seems to be from the Spanish historian and Jesuit missionary Ignacio Alcina, who wrote in 1668,

"Finally, it could have happened that people from various larger or smaller islands passed over to the others, as is an established fact among them. For instance, those on the Island of Bantayan, which is near Cebu, are actually descendants of the people living on Samar Island and on the western side or opposite that of Ibabao. Today, they admit that they are related by blood because the latter were populated in more recent times." (translation by editors)

The

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of Bantayanon is that Old Waray dialect that moved across Bantayan and eventually onto Panay Island, and later Bantayanon was heavily influenced in its lexicon by Cebuano.

Modern scholarship on the Bantayanon language

The only published scholarship on the Bantayanon language is a Master of Arts thesis presented to Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT) by Minda Carabio-Sexon,Carabio-Sexon, Minda. 2007. "Bantayanon: A Lexical Comparison and Sociolinguistic Description." Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology. in which she looks at the lexical relationship between Bantayanon and its neighboring languages, presents findings from mutual-intelligibility tests with related languages, and provides a sociolinguistic profile of the island's inhabitants. She also provides transcriptions and English translations of two of her collected interviews. There is currently a documentation project of Bantayanon underway by researcher Jarrette K. Allen, a PhD candidate at

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Phonology and orthography

Bantayanon has sixteen consonantal

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s and three vocalic phonemes. The following

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

is the one currently being developed, since Bantayanon is still considered an undocumented/undescribed language with no literary history. It draws on the orthographies of Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Filipino, but also diverges in some ways. All final

plosives In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

in Bantayanon are unreleased. It has not been demonstrated that Bantayanon aspirates any consonants. There are no

syllabic consonant A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''awful'', respectively. To represe ...

s in Bantayanon. The following phonemes are written as they are in the IPA (above table): p b t d k g m n s h w l. These phonemes are written as such: * If a root in Bantayanon does not begin with another consonant, it begins with a

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

/ʔ/, but this glottal is only ever indicated in the orthography when that glottal appears word-medially due to

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...

ation or

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...

. * The glottal stop is written as a hyphen (-) in all word-medial positions. This is atypical of Central Bisayan languages, which assume a glottal between vowels (i.e. ''aa'' = ). However, it is necessary to write long vowels in Bantayanon, for they are contrastive, and this is done by doubling the vowel (i.e. ''aa'' = ) and marking all word-medial glottals (''a-a'' = ). * The glottal stop in word-final positions (always over a vowel) is indicated with a

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(e.g. ). * The

velar nasal The voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek 'fragment'), is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''E ...

is written with ''ng'' and can appear word-initially, medially, and finally. * The tap or flap is written with an ''r''. *The glides and are written with a ''w'' and a ''y'', respectively. Like Cebuano, Bantayanon has only three vocalic phonemes. There is no or in Bantayanon, although many use the letters ''o'' and ''e'' when writing. All syllables in Bantayanon contain one and only one vowel.

References

{{Languages of the Philippines Languages of Cebu Visayan languages