Botolan is a Sambalic language spoken by 32,867 ( SIL 2000)

Sambal Sambal is an Indonesian chili sauce or paste, typically made from a mixture of chillis with secondary ingredients such as shrimp paste (terasi), garlic, ginger, shallot, scallion, palm sugar, and lime juice. ''Sambal'' is an Indonesia ...

, primarily in the

Zambal The Sambal people are a Filipino ethnolinguistic group living primarily in the province of Zambales and the Pangasinense municipalities of Bolinao, Anda, and Infanta. The term may also refer to the general inhabitants of Zambales. They were al ...

municipalities of

Botolan Botolan, officially the Municipality of Botolan, is a municipality in the province of Zambales, Philippines. According to the 2020 census, it has a population of 66,739 people. The municipality was founded by Spanish Governor-General Juan de S ...

and Cabangan in the

Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...

. Language status is 5 (developing).

Varieties

The Ayta people of sitio Villar,

, and sitio Kakilingan, Santa Fe, Cabangan also speak a Botolan dialect with some unique lexical items.

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' 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 comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

reports Ayta Hambali (Hambali Botolan), Sambali Botolan as dialects of Sambal Botolan. Among themselves, Ayta Hambali reportedly use some words that are similar to Ayta, Mag-Anchi.

Phonology

Botolan has 20

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: 16

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

s and four

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s. Syllable structure is relatively simple. Each syllable contains at least a consonant and a vowel.

Vowels

Botolan has four vowels. They are: */a/ an

open central unrounded vowel The open central unrounded vowel, or low central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in several spoken languages. While the International Phonetic Alphabet officially has no dedicated letter for this sound between front and back , ...

similar to English ''father'' */e/ a

close-mid front unrounded vowel The close-mid front unrounded vowel, or high-mid front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabeti ...

similar to

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

*/i/ a

close front unrounded vowel The close front unrounded vowel, or high front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that occurs in most spoken languages, represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by the symbol i. It is similar to the vowel sound in the Englis ...

similar to English ''machine'' */u/ (written as ‘o’) a

close back unrounded vowel The close back unrounded vowel, or high back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . Typographically, it is a turned letter . ...

similar to English ''flute'' There are five main

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

s: , , , /ij/, and .

Consonants

Below is a chart of Botolan consonants. All the stops are unaspirated. 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 ...

occurs in all positions including at the beginning of a word. Note: Consonants and can sometimes interchange as they were once allophones.

Stress

Stress is phonemic in Botolan. Word stress is very important; it differentiates

homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are either; '' homographs''—words that mean different things, but have the same spelling (regardless of pronunciation), or '' homophones''—words that mean different things, but have the same pronunciat ...

s, e.g. ('I') and ('elbow').

Historical sound changes

Many words pronounced with and in Tagalog have and , respectively, in their cognates in Botolan. Compare and with the Tagalog and .

Sample texts

The Lord's Prayer

Version from Matthew

Philippine national proverb

Below is a translation in Botolan of the Philippine national proverb "He who does not acknowledge his beginnings will not reach his destination," followed by the original in Tagalog. *Botolan: *Tagalog:

References

External links

Grammar sketch of Botolan found on Carl Rubino's homepageSample recordings from the GRN Network
in Botolan

Bible verses in Botolan {{DEFAULTSORT:Botolan Language Sambalic languages Languages of Zambales