The Chabacano Orthography Ten Years Later

It's been ten years since the Chabacano orthography came out in 2016 and I wonder if they ever thought of evaluating its outcome.

On social media, there is SOME adoption although I noticed people will only spell Chabacano words using the orthography selectively.

The dictionary Lexicography came out four years after the city government held a congress on Chabacano orthography and unlike the first few years after its release, is no longer as scarce. I'm not sure how true it is but my friend said anyone can now ask for a physical copy from the city library. 

The Chabacano orthography congress was held in 2014.

The Chavacano versus Chabacano debate was very contentious that in the end they had to use Chabacano/Chavacano on the dictionary they published. Yes, if you can believe it, this is how petty people can be. If you are reading this from the future, I hope that humanity has evolved greatly by the time you are reading this.

I still remember this time very well. There was so little content in Chabacano on Facebook so everything written or recorded in Chabacano was very visible and prone to criticisms about the spelling or the words used not being Chabacano enough. Today, there is a multitude of Chabacano content online so the purists can no longer keep up.

One of the recurring themes surrounding Chabacano is its spelling. In fact, it was one of the things that Camins struggled with when he created his Chabacano dictionary. When I translated The Little Prince into Chabacano, this was also a major challenge so much so that I had to create a unique spelling system just for that book.

The general rule of spelling words etymologically is not new and is in fact, the exact same rule laid out by Camins in the preface of his dictionary. Looking at that dictionary though, a lot of native words were actually spelled in Spanish. 

While I was creating a new book consisting of Philippine Folk Tales translated into Chabacano, I had the opportunity to study the dictionary that was created after they came out with the general orthography rule in 2016. I noticed a lot of inconsistencies in that dictionary, but I have to believe that these were intentional because, with all the PhDs involved in its creation, surely the inconsistencies have to be intentional!

Some words were spelled differently in the addendum at the last part of the second volume of Lexicography compared to the actual dictionary. For example, the word for grass appears as sacate in the actual dictionary but appears as zacate (same spelling as Spanish) in the addendum (page 606). Uste which is the Chabacano pronounciation and spelled as usted in Spanish appears also as usted in the actual dictionary but uste in the addendum.

It's important to note that spelling words etymologically can mean using the alphabet used in the language of origin or it can also mean spelling the words exactly or as closely as possible to how they appear in dictionaries. Sacate, in this case, does not necessarily go against the general orthography rule. At first, I thought that maybe they got rid of the letter Z altogether since it's not intuitive for Chabacano speakers to spell with the letter Z especially since we pronounce this word as sacate. But then I also saw words like zambulli as well as razon in the dictionary. Here is where the inconsistencies become glaring.

Most Chabacano speakers will pronounce the letter Z like the English Z, that's why the Maldita band pronounces the Z in the word corazon as if it were an English word. Even if the letter Z is pronounced as a S by some Spanish speakers, Chabacano speakers are generally educated in English and NOT Spanish.

While both cogi and coge appear in lexicography, only the forms recoge and escoge are considered as correct spelling. Recogi/recugi and escogi/iscugi are not in the dictionary and therefore considered incorrect.

The word vira is one of my favorite words in Chabacano. It is used to indicate going back to a certain place, rotating something, or turning around. It is a versatile word that you will use almost everyday in Chabacano. I wrote about this word here back in 2023. I have reason to believe that it is from Spanish so my heart broke when I saw that they spelled it as bira in Lexicography.

The Chabacano word for connection in Lexicography is coneccion which is not the canonical Spanish spelling found in dictionaries because this is spelled as conexion in Spanish.

Another thing I noticed was that they used different spellings of the same word to perhaps differentiate the same words when the meaning changes. For example, to protect is protégé but to ward becomes proteje. The word for seed meanwhile is pipita which is how we pronounce this in Chabacano (while it's spelled as pepita in Spanish). They did include the word pepita in the dictionary, defined as nugget.

Meanwhile the word for beans is similia (because beans are technically seeds), and then it becomes semilla when listed under seed.

The English word again is listed as otravez (yes, one word) in Lexicography while otra vez is listed under the English word anew. 

At first, I thought that this was a way to differentiate words but then later I realized that all these words are practically synonyms. And that's when it hit me, these could also be just a way of listing variations of the SAME word. In other words, otravez and otra vez are accepted. Of course, this isn't applicable to all words listed above.

To ask is pedi but then you also see pidi perdon as well as pidi dispensacion in the dictionary. And just when I was about to conclude that it becomes pidi when paired with another word, I come across pedi hora which means to make an appointment. So as you can see, it's hard to justify these inconsistencies.

Several words from Philippine languages were spelled with a C and not with a K such as tacuri (kettle) and cuba (hunchback).  I can't figure out what the reason behind this is because they spelled kalayat with a K and not calayat. Spelling words of native origin with a C instead of a K is a complete and outright contradiction to the general orthography rule because the letter C is used exclusively for foreign words in Filipino orthography.

Another word of Philippine origin that was not spelled etymologically is the word silaw which was spelled as silao in Lexicography. In other words, they used Spanish spelling for the words kuba, takuri, and silaw.

The word meanwhile which is mientrastanto (one word) in Spanish is two words (mientras tanto) in the dictionary. This makes sense because for most Chabacano speakers, mientrastanto sounds like two separate words. 

There are also some anglicisms in Lexicography like checkpoint which is already an assimilated English word in Chabacano. However, it's strange that the Chabacano equivalent for schedule is scedule. This doesn't make any sense to me. I mean in Filipino, we were taught to spell this word as iskedyul because this is the way it is pronounced by Filipinos so changing the spelling in Chabacano is not without precedent but spelling it as scedule just doesn't make sense. Is it a typo? Maybe they forgot the letter H? I mean a dictionary is the last place you want to have typos on, right? And note that even in the blue edition of Lexicography by Dalipe, this word is still spelled as scedule so unless they still haven't corrected it in the third edition, it does seem to be intentional.

One word which is an obvious typo in Lexicography is de cos which is supposed to be de vos. I asked my friend who has the third edition printed under the Dalipe administration to check this exact same page and apparently, they still have not corrected it. The very first edition was the green one while the second edition was the pink.

It was only when I consulted the dictionary published by the city hall while creating the folktales book that I realized that they used accent marks on some words. However, it's a bit hard to decipher the system for using them. For example, por que and dia appear with accent marks just like in Spanish, but the usage of the accent marks in Lexicography is not the same as in Spanish because there are a lot of words written with an accent mark in Spanish that appear without one in the dictionary. Meanwhile, there are words that appear with accent marks like protégé that do not have an accent mark in Spanish. I can't tell either why protégé would have accent marks when other Chabacano verbs in the dictionary do not. 

I remember someone asking me before about my opinion on using accent marks in Chabacano and I told them that accent marks could be useful when it comes to making reading easier. For example if we spell it as le and not lee, we now have two possible meanings for the same word, he or him and to read. That would make it difficult to read a sentence like no hay pa le le el libro (he has not yet read the book). But do I think that this is absolutely necessary? I don't. We can look at Tagalog which doesn't make use of accent marks even with several words that change meaning just based on the stress. Even in Spanish, the accent marks are not really needed because you can certainly comprehend Spanish texts without a single accent mark.

I remember reading a poem in Tagalog a few weeks ago and seeing the word basa with an accent mark (basâ). I was intrigued and asked the writer about it and I was surprised because he said it's because basa can mean two different things wet and to read. Personally, I did not think it was necessary because it was very obvious from the context which meaning of basa was being referred to in the poem. In Chabacano, we usually put the letter H at the end to indicate the glottal stop.

When I met the late Dr. Yap-Aizon at the city hall in 2018, he told me that he knew that standardization in written Chabacano won't be achieved in his lifetime or even mine. Maybe he is right. We only have to look at Tagalog which took three generations to standardize and even Cebuano is not yet as standardized as Tagalog is.

It all begins with the kids. Adoption will most probably happen through the conditioning that students receive from the school system. My generation and even the Gen Z, that had very little exposure to Spanish will have a very hard time adopting this spelling system.

But maybe we can leverage social media. Today, most conversations are taking place on social media and it's much easier to influence and change people's perceptions. Perhaps a whole of government approach can be taken together with social media influencers to make the orthography and the spelling system developed around it more palatable to the people.

Or perhaps we need a better spelling system and an updated orthography. As expressed by Camins, several words native and of Spanish origin have undergone shifts in pronunciation in the Chabacano language and this is something not addressed by the general Chabacano orthography rule. We need a spelling system that does not leave the speakers with a cringey feeling just from using it. Spelling words etymologically is very awkward since it doesn't reflect the pronunciation shift that has taken place from the originating language. We need a spelling system where rules can easily be created and where the rules are very intuitive (like a cellphone being user-friendly). An inconsistent spelling system and a difficult one will not gain mass adoption.

I'm not sure what role the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino plays in orthographies because when I asked then mayor Beng Climaco in 2014, she told me that they had to wait for acceptance from the KWF before they can publish and release what they were working on at that time and much later in 2017, Dr. Yap Aizon told me that the KWF doesn't really approve or disapprove orthographies. On Facebook though, it sounds like they do. In fact, they recently released a book on Ilokano's official orthography.

English translation:

The Latest Edition of Tarabay Released During Dap-ayan 2026

The latest edition of Tarabay iti Ortograpia ti Pagsasao nga Ilokano (Guide to the Orthography of the Ilokano Language) was released during Dap-ayan 2026: The 58th National Convention of Ilokano Writers and Celebration of April as Ilokano Literature Month, held on April 18–19, 2026, at the MMDA Head Office in Pasig City.

First published in 2012, Tarabay was developed through the initiative of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) under Atty. Connie Luis, who at the time served as the Commissioner for the Ilokano Language, in collaboration with Bannawag, under the leadership of then-editor Cles B. Rambaud. A series of consultations was also conducted through the cooperation of GUMIL Filipinas.

This latest edition was published by KWF Publikasyon through the initiative of Dr. Benjamin Mendillo, Jr., Commissioner for the Ilokano Language, as part of the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between KWF and GUMIL Filipinas that was renewed in 2024. As with the earlier editions, the editors of Bannawag undertook the updating/revision of the publication.