The Kagayanen language is spoken in the

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

Palawan Palawan (, ), officially the Province of Palawan (; ), is an archipelagic province of the Philippines that is located in the region of Mimaropa. It is the largest province in the country in terms of total area of . The capital and largest c ...

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 ...

. It belongs to the

Manobo The Manobò (sometimes also spelled Menobò, Manuvù , Menuvù , or Minuvù) are an indigenous peoples from Mindanao in the Philippines, whose core lands cover most of the Mindanao island group, from Sarangani island into the Mindanao mainland in ...

subgroup of the

Austronesian Austronesian may refer to: *The Austronesian languages *The historical Austronesian peoples The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Sout ...

language family and is the only member of this subgroup that is not spoken on

Mindanao Mindanao ( ) is the List of islands of the Philippines, second-largest island in the Philippines, after Luzon, and List of islands by population, seventh-most populous island in the world. Located in the southern region of the archipelago, the ...

or nearby islands.

Distribution

Kagayanen is spoken in the following areas: * Palawan Province:

Cagayancillo Cagayancillo, officially the Municipality of Cagayancillo (), is a municipality in the province of Palawan, Philippines. According to the 2020 census, it has a population of 6,884 people. Located between the islands of Palawan and Negros in th ...

Island between Negros and Palawan *Palawan coastal communities *southern Palawan:

Balabac Island Balabac Island is the southernmost island of Palawan province, and therefore the westernmost undisputed island in the Philippines, some north of Sabah, Malaysia, across the Balabac Strait. Administratively, the island forms the main part of th ...

*northern Palawan: Busuanga and Coron *other areas around the Philippines: Iloilo Province; Silay, Negros; Manila; Quezon and Rizal areas

Phonology

occurs only in loan words, proper names, or in words that have in the cognates of neighboring languages. Outside of loanwords, becomes between vowels. Comparative and historical evidence suggests that and were in

complementary distribution In linguistics, complementary distribution (as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation) is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...

before a split occurred likely with pressure from contact with English,

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

, and Tagalog. ranges between and , except in unstressed syllables (as well as before

consonant cluster 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 ...

s) where it lowers to or . Similarly, lowers to in unstressed syllables, before consonant clusters, and word-finally. It is otherwise .

Grammar

Most roots in Kagayanen do not have a defined

part of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech ( abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ...

but can function in predication (like verbs), referring (like nouns), or modifying (like adjectives and adverbs). For example, is a root often used to refer to "cooked rice", but when inflected as a verb, the same root can mean "eat". Verbs are inflected for mood, volition,

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound produ ...

(transitive/intransitive in Pebley's terminology), and whether the absolutive argument is a typical affected patient ( applicative marking). As with other Austronesian languages, one argument of a verb is always treated specially by the syntax. Pebley refers to this unmarked noun phrase (which is often but not always in a

patient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by Health professional, healthcare professionals. The patient is most often Disease, ill or Major trauma, injured and in need of therapy, treatment by a physician, nurse, op ...

role when another argument is present) simply as the "absolutive" argument. (Van Valin 2005) refers to this as the PSA, the "privileged syntactic argument", but linguists use a variety of terms to refer to this type of argument.

Notes

References

* * * {{Languages of the Philippines Manobo languages Languages of Palawan