Lexicophonetic and perceptual dialectology of Panay

• Main Author: Rentillo, Philip Adrianne A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Dialectology; Linguistic geography; Education
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdd_deal/8; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=etdd_deal
• Institution: De La Salle University

Current dialectological research on Philippine-type languages and varieties remains scarce. Up to this day efforts focused on the Philippine linguistic context have only taken advantage of crude methodologies while there are very few investigations at a finer-grained scope. To address this immense scholarly gap, this dissertation has three investigative goals. The first study provided an exploratory description of linguistic varieties and variation in Panay through a combination of dialectometric and qualitative approaches on production data. Data were gathering through a series of interviews using a 495-item wordlist involving 262 informants from the four provinces of the island. This identified dialect areas through a combination of hierarchical clustering, multidimensional scaling, field inquiry, and digital visualization techniques. Five dialect zones were identified. The first three include well-defined zones, namely an Akeanon zone containing four dialect areas within Aklan, an Antique Kinaray-a zone with five dialect areas within Antique, and a Caluyanon zone within the Caluya Islands. The other two zones are within a Central Bisayan-West Bisayan contact zone with the first being a convergence zone involving 9 dialect areas mostly in Iloilo where Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a interact, while the second is a Hiligaynon-Capiznon dialect continuum covering 10 dialect areas spanning Iloilo and Capiz. The second study meanwhile interpolated the linguistic variation data from the first study with extralinguistic profiles of geographic and population contours of the region. This revealed that the diffusion and extent of dialect areas in Panay indeed follow a gravitational pattern according to the Gravity Model, where the linguistic influences and contact are more intense between the nearest population center and surrounding dialect areas than the primary source of a standard variety. Lastly, a third study incorporated perceptual dialectology to understand the linguistic ecology of Panay as guided by the Language Regard Model. This came in two phases: The first provided a description of perceptions and awareness of 363 locals on the linguistic varieties of Panay. Through a perceptual and awareness survey, notions of pleasantness, similarity, awareness of local varieties were measured through Likert-type questionnaires and a draw-a-map task. Using data specifically from the mental maps, findings were qualitatively compared with established dialect areas from the first study to bridge the role of folk linguistics to formal linguistic methods. The second phase, the only purely qualitative component, was a follow-up interview on the motivations and impressions of participants in answering the earlier survey. It was found in the first phase that there is an overall negative correlation between perceptual ratings level of dialectal awareness, and that there is an overall positive correlation between perceived degree of pleasantness and similarity of dialect. Notions of similarity in particular also correspond with well-established classifications of linguistic relationships among the languages in the island. On the one hand, the mental maps show near consistency of folk knowledge on the existence and extent of local dialects to the dialect areas established via dialectometric means. Respondent inputs were also found to be valuable additions in further refining the descriptions of dialect areas. Lastly, the second phase of the third study revealed that respondents were likely to base their notions of pleasantness of dialects mainly on prosody and familiarity, while notions of similarity were based on prosody, lexicon, and familiarity. In addition, their awareness of local dialects is solely reliant upon direct interaction with speakers and indirect knowledge. Keywords: dialectometry; perceptual dialectology; Philippine-type languages; GIS; dialect geography