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The Little Prince By Antoine De Saint-Exupéry Is Now Available In Chabacano!

While Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) written by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry in 1943 now has over 300 translations in different languages worldwide and is now considered the world’s most translated book (not counting religious works), there have been surprisingly only two translations of his book in the Philippines (Filipino and Bicol). El Diutay Principe is only the third edition featuring a Philippine language. The Little Prince is a classic French novella about a pilot who gets stranded in the desert after a plane crash and encounters a little fellow who asks him to draw a sheep for him. Through the course of their meeting, the pilot rediscovers the true meaning of life and what people should value the most. When I came across the book in 2013, I found that I could relate very well to the negative image given to “growing up” in the book. When the idea to translate the book into my mother tongue was presented to me, I didn’t think twice. I thought, ‘a lot of people my ...
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Are Zamboangueños Influencing the Chabacano in Ternate?

Lately, I have been noticing that more and more Chabacano (Zamboanga) speakers in Facebook use the Tagalog kung instead of si when saying 'if'.

What's interesting about it is that some of them are spelling it as con. But what's even more interesting is that today, I saw in a Facebook post by Debahraknows that this also occurs in the Chabacano spoken in Ternate!


As far I understood it, the text on the photo says that politicians, once elected tend to forget about the people but will be the ones to go to you if elections are already near.

In the past, I have commented that more and more, the Chabacano in Zamboanga city is sounding similar to that of its Luzon counterparts because of the shift in preference for Tagalog conjunctions and particles instead of the usual Hiligaynon/Cebuano as well as Spanish. But seeing this particular phenomenon happen in both languages is quite an awesome coincidence.

Of course, we can't conclude right away that this took place on its own and developed without both languages interacting with one another. 

I think owing to the sheer number of Chabacano (Zamboanga) content online, it might be possible that these might be influencing the Cavite Chabacano content creators who follow Zamboanga Chabacano content creators.

What do you think? Are Zamboangueño influencers changing the Chabacano in Cavite?


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