Tboli (), also Tau Bilil, Tau Bulul or Tagabilil, is an Austronesian language spoken in the southern

Philippine The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

island of

Mindanao Mindanao ( ) ( Jawi: مينداناو) is the second-largest island in the Philippines, after Luzon, and seventh-most populous island in the world. Located in the southern region of the archipelago, the island is part of an island group of ...

, mainly in the

province A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or sovereign state, state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''Roman province, provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire ...

South Cotabato South Cotabato ( hil, Bagatnan Cotabato; ceb, Habagatang Cotabato; Maguindanaon: ''Pagabagatan Kutawatu'', Jawi: ڤاڬابڬتن كوتاواتو; tl, Timog Cotabato), officially the Province of South Cotabato, is a province in the Philippine ...

but also in the neighboring provinces of

Sultan Kudarat Sultan Kudarat, officially the Province of Sultan Kudarat ( hil, Kapuoran sang Sultan Kudarat; Maguindanaon: ''Dairat nu Sultan Kudarat'', Jawi: دايرت نو سلطان كودرت; ceb, Lalawigan sa Sultan Kudarat; tl, Lalawigan ng Sul ...

and

Sarangani Sarangani, officially the Province of Sarangani ( ceb, Lalawigan sa Sarangani; hil, Kapuoran sang Sarangani; Maguindanaon: ''Dairat nu Sarangani'', Jawi: دايرت نو سارڠني; fil, Lalawigan ng Sarangani), is a province in the Philipp ...

. According to the Philippine Census from 2000, close to 100,000 Filipinos identified ''T'boli'' or ''Tagabili'' as their native language.

Classification

Tboli is classified as a member of the South Mindanao or Bilic branch of the

language families. The closest language to it is Blaan. Both are also related to

Bagobo The Lumad are a group of Austronesian indigenous people in the southern Philippines. It is a Cebuano term meaning "native" or "indigenous". The term is short for Katawhang Lumad (Literally: "indigenous people"), the autonym officially adopte ...

, and Tiruray.

Geographic distribution

Tboli is spoken in the following areas (''

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...

''). *

Province: Mount Busa area and west *

Province: Celebes seacoast, Katabau west to provincial border *

Province: Kraun area and Bagumbayan municipality Dialects are Central Tboli, Western Tboli, and Southern Tboli (''

'').

Phonology

Phonemic inventory

list seven

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

s, namely and 15

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...

phonemes shown in the chart below. Note that Tboli lacks as a phoneme and has instead, which is a typological rarity among Philippine languages.

Stress

Final stress is the norm in Tboli rootwords; however, the stress shifts to the previous syllable if the final vowel is a schwa.

Phonotactics

Unlike most other Philippine languages and Austronesian languages in general, Tboli permits a variety of

consonant clusters In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

at the

onset Onset may refer to: *Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound *Onset, Massachusetts Onset is a census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Wareham, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 1,573 at the 2010 census. Geog ...

of a

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

. This is evident in the name of the language, , but also in other words like 'dust', , 'one month,' 'starry,' 'temporarily,' 'before,' and others. observe impressionistically there is a very short

schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...

pronounced in between the consonant cluster. However, these consonant clusters have not yet been analyzed acoustically.

Grammar

Nouns

Unlike other Philippine languages, Tboli does not make use of case-marking

articles Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: G ...

. Plurality is marked by the article preceding the noun; 'horse' (sg.), 'horses.'

Pronouns

Tboli

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...

s indicate

person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...

clusivity In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee ...

, and grammatical role. group Tboli pronouns into two main categories based on what they term "

focus Focus, or its plural form foci may refer to: Arts * Focus or Focus Festival, former name of the Adelaide Fringe arts festival in South Australia Film *''Focus'', a 1962 TV film starring James Whitmore * ''Focus'' (2001 film), a 2001 film based ...

," which appear to be related to the

absolutive In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative� ...

- ergative case system in other Philippine languages. There are two further subcategories for each which deal with whether the singular pronouns behave as enclitics or as independent words. Their use depends on their role and position in a sentence. Examples using the third person plural pronoun. * . 'They eat.' (focused, dependent pronoun). * . 'They are the ones who ate.' (focused, independent pronoun) * . 'Their house.' (nonfocused, dependent pronoun). * . 'May God take care of them.' (nonfocused, independent pronoun).

Syntax

Word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

in Tboli is usually verb-subject-object, though there is some variation.

Verbs

Tboli, like other Philippine languages, makes a distinction between transitive and

intransitive verb In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...

s. Intransitive verbs are marked with the affix ''me-'' while transitive verbs are marked with ''ne-''. Unlike Philippine languages, applicative affixes are not used in Tboli though prepositions are used instead. Furthermore,

aspect Aspect or Aspects may refer to: Entertainment * ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art * Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company * Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England * ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...

marking is not marked on the verb but with preverbal aspect markers such as (completed actions) and (incomplete action).

Morphology

Tboli makes use of

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the Word stem, stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy'' ...

es and

infix An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with ''adfix,'' a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix. When marking text for int ...

es. claim that

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...

es do not exist in the language, though

proclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...

affixes may be thought of as such.

Writing system

Tboli has no official writing system, though the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...

is usually used to write the language. The orthography is more or less similar to the one employed by Tagalog: b, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, ng (for ), s, t, w, and y (for ), though other letters may be used in writing foreign words. use a system of diacritics to accommodate the seven vowel phonemes of Tboli. The vowels are: a, i, é (for ), e (for ), ó (for ), u, and o (for ). The glottal stop is usually not represented in writing. Though the

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...

` is used to represent it as in 'child' and 'serving spoon.' If a vowel already has a diacritic on it, then the

circumflex accent The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...

^ is used as in and 'don't.' Awed et al. note that sometimes that the apostrophe may be used to break up an initial consonant cluster as in the name of the language; that is, ''T'boli'' instead of simply ''Tboli''. They note that native Tboli speakers have had "a very strong negative reaction" to this convention, preferring instead to write ''Tboli''.

References

* * *

External links

tboli.webonary.org
- Online version of SIL's "Tboli - English Dictionary." Languages of South Cotabato Languages of Sultan Kudarat Languages of Sarangani South Mindanao languages {{philippine-lang-stub