The Chabacano in Cotabato

At the Día del Libro several months ago, a guy comes up to the booth and asks me what 'hello' is in Chabacano. My mind immediately went into overthinking mode just like last year when the same thing happened.

Last year, I was sharing a booth with another organization when this man walks up to me and asks what 'hello' is in Chabacano. My mind went on a spiral because one of my pet peeves is when I see people online say that 'hello' is 'hola' in Chabacano. I mean you have the same problem in Tagalog or Filipino. I notice when foreigners ask what 'hello' is in Tagalog, they usually get a reply like 'magandang araw' or 'kumusta' (which are all indirect translations). 

When he saw that I had a hard time answering the question, he was like oh, come on, you translated Le Petit Prince but can't translate one simple word? But isn't it possible that the concept of a verbal greeting is a western import? I mean what if the original native greeting was just a nod or raising of eyebrows and grunting at each other?

For me, the best answer to the question 'what is hello in Tagalog, Filipino, or even Chabacano' is simply that it’s also 'hello'. Because hello! Isn’t that the word we all use, whether we are speaking Tagalog, Cebuano, or Chabacano? I also wrote about the word hola in Chabacano back in 2021 wherein I described seeing more influencers start their videos or programs with a 'hola'. Five years later, the trend is still strong, but will it eventually spread to being used conversationally? We shall see. For now, hola is a very prescriptivist answer to what hello is in Chabacano. In real life, just like in Tagalog or in any other place in the Philippines, we all use the word hello.

Back to present time, I was about to ask the man in front of me if he wanted a descriptivist answer or a prescriptivist answer when I realized that he probably just wanted to start a conversation and not listen to an entire lecture.

It turns out this man spoke Chabacano and he was from Cotabato! The Chabacano in Cotabato is usually listed as a separate variant but it's definitely mutually intelligible with the Chabacano in Zamboanga City if I were to judge just based on my interaction with this person.

In fact, when I asked this person what were the differences between our Chabacano, he had a hard time coming up with an answer. It wasn't until I mentioned the presence of words from the Maguindanaon language in their Chabacano that he confirmed that this is indeed one of the differences between the two Chabacano languages. I only came across this information through my brother who met someone from Cotabato who spoke Chabacano.

Another thing that he mentioned was the word 'manada' not being used in Cotabato which was very interesting because Camins in his dictionary talks about using 'manada' as a synonym of 'mucho' is incorrect. He explains that it is a noun meaning herd. Obviously in contemporary Chabacano, 'manada' as an adjective is already accepted and it is interchangeable with 'mucho'. It's important to note that Camins wrote the dictionary back in the last quarter of the previous century and he was very old when he did it. So, it seems that this word was fossilized in the Chabacano in Cotabato and did not go through the same evolution as its counterpart in Zamboanga.

Another word that behaves like this is 'menta', which is used to mean 'to accuse' but is listed as 'to mention' in Chabacano dictionaries. Perhaps, it is also fossilized in the Chabacano in Cotabato.

Interestingly, there seems to be a wide consensus from those who speak Chabacano in Cotabato that the language came from Zamboanga. I asked this person if people who spoke Chabacano in Cotabato had relatives in Zamboanga city and he said yes. In fact, he said that they also celebrate Fiesta Pilar in their community and had a chapel dedicated to the Lady of Pillar.

I'm not sure if the same holds true for Chabacano speakers in Basilan, though it likely does. I think most of them even maintain a residence in Zamboanga. I had classmates in college who were from Lamitan but had residences in Zamboanga and spoke Chabacano. I never really noticed anything strange with their Chabacano except that they used interjections like raman a lot. It was strange because you don't hear young people who grew up in Zamboanga use it. Not even those from faraway places! They also spoke with a very heavy Chabacano accent which we usually derogatively describe as de monte or provincial. But the Chabacano in Basilan is definitely the same as our Chabacano. I think we can.

Did you know that the late poet Francis Macansantos who wrote Chabacano poems was from Cotabato City?

According to one of the late administrators of Zamboanga de Antes, Chabacano was brought to Cotabato around the 1900s by Chinese (Chinoy?) businessmen from Zamboanga. Through the letters sent to Hugo Schuchardt (a German linguist) in 1883 by Jacinto Juanmartí, we know for sure that they spoke Chabacano in Cotabato in 1883.

Very similar to other Philippine languages, the Chabacano in Cotabato seemed to have been displaced by other languages through migration. Today, it is mostly just old people who speak it.

At Día del Libro, I met an old person who looked at the Chabacano expression cards on my table and told me that his grandmother would have used the word viand and not ulam. One of the Chabacano expressions in my Guess-the-Chabacano-Phrase game was cosa el ulam. During our conversation, I also had to explain to him that the expression 'todo bagon' was new and that it was synonymous to 'tonterias'. He lit up when I used that word, probably because there aren't that many Chabacano speakers who still use that word these days.

I sold Chabacano merchandise and of course, El Diutay Principe.

I have completely forgotten all about it but upon searching this blog, I found out that I wrote about the Chabacano in Cotabato back in 2013. In the article, I talked about a study done by Maria Isabelita O. Riego de Dios regarding the different Chabacano dialects. In her study she compares the different words used in the Chabacano dialects of Zamboanga, Ternate, Cavite (city), and Cotabato. The article also links to a dictionary which was produced from the study. It's a very nice dictionary that compares all the different variants with each other. When I wrote the article, I said that it was a preliminary entry, but it looks like I never made a follow up. I wrote this back in 2013 and at that time, I was using the spelling ChaVacano for the variants in Cavite, Ternate, and Ermita while ChaBacano for the variant in Zamboanga in the article. Please note that this is only for differentiation purposes and occurs only in this blog. For my recent articles, I have transitioned to using ChaBacano for all variants for purposes of uniformity.