Kagayanen language

The Kagayanen language is spoken in the province of Palawan in the Philippines. It belongs to the Manobo subgroup of the Austronesian language family and is the only member of this subgroup that is not spoken on Mindanao or nearby islands.

Distribution

Kagayanen is spoken in the following areas:

Palawan Province: Cagayancillo Island between Negros and Palawan
Palawan coastal communities
southern Palawan: Balabac Island
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 before a split occurred likely with pressure from contact with English, Spanish, and Filipino.

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Open

ranges between and, except in unstressed syllables 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 but can function in predication, referring, or modifying. 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, and whether the absolutive argument is a typical affected patient. As with other Austronesian languages, one argument of a verb is always treated specially by the syntax. Pebley refers to this unmarked noun phrase simply as the "absolutive" argument. refers to this as the PSA, the "privileged syntactic argument", but linguists use a variety of terms to refer to this type of argument.