Cebuano language

Cebuano is an Austronesian language spoken in the southern Philippines by Bisaya people and other ethnic groups as a secondary language. It is natively, though informally, called by the generic name Bisayâ, or Binisayâ and sometimes referred to in English sources as Cebuan. It is spoken by the Visayan ethnolinguistic groups native to the islands of Cebu, Bohol, Siquijor, the eastern half of Negros, the western half of Leyte, the northern coastal areas of Northern Mindanao and the eastern part of Zamboanga del Norte due to Spanish settlements during the 18th century. In modern times, it has also spread to the Davao Region, Cotabato, Camiguin, parts of the Dinagat Islands, and the lowland regions of Caraga, often displacing native languages in those areas.
While Tagalog has the largest number of native speakers among the languages of the Philippines today, Cebuano had the largest native-language-speaking population from the 1950s until about the 1980s. It is by far the most widely spoken of the Bisayan languages.
Cebuano is the lingua franca of Central Visayas, the western parts of Eastern Visayas, some western parts of Palawan, and most parts of Mindanao. The name Cebuano is derived from the island of Cebu, which is the source of Standard Cebuano. Cebuano is also the primary language in Western Leyte—noticeably in Ormoc. Cebuano is assigned the ISO 639-2 three-letter code but not an ISO 639-1 two-letter code.
The Commission on the Filipino Language, the Philippine government body charged with developing and promoting the national and regional languages of the country, spells the name of the language in Filipino as Sebwano.
While it is not widely spoken in Luzon, there are a few Cebuano communities in Metro Manila, Calabarzon, Bulacan, throughout Central Luzon, northernmost Luzon, including Cordillera Administrative Region, and Ilocos Region.

Nomenclature

The term Cebuano derives from "Cebu" and "ano" which means "people/s", a Latinate calque reflecting the Philippines' Spanish colonial heritage. Speakers of Cebuano in Cebu and even those from outside of Cebu commonly refer to the language as Bisayâ.
The name Cebuano, however, has not been accepted by all who speak it. Cebuano speakers in certain portions of Leyte, Northern Mindanao, Davao Region, Caraga, and Zamboanga Peninsula objected to the name of the language and claimed that their ancestry traces back to Bisayâ speakers native to their place and not from immigrants or settlers from Cebu. Furthermore, they refer to their ethnicity as Bisayâ instead of Cebuano and their language as Binisayâ instead of Cebuano. However, there is a pushback on these objections. Some language enthusiasts insist on referring to the language as Cebuano because, as they claim, using the terms Bisayâ and Binisayâ to refer to ethnicity and language, respectively, is exclusivist and disenfranchises the speakers of the Hiligaynon language and the Waray language who also refer to their languages as Binisayâ to distinguish them from Cebuano Bisayâ.
Existing linguistic studies on Visayan languages, most notably that of R. David Paul Zorc, has described the language spoken in Cebu, Negros Occidental, Bohol, Leyte, and most parts of Mindanao as "Cebuano". Zorc's studies on Visayan language serves as the bible of linguistics in the study of Visayan languages. The Jesuit linguist and a native of Cabadbaran, Rodolfo Cabonce, S.J., published two dictionaries during his stays in Cagayan de Oro City and Manolo Fortich in Bukidnon: a Cebuano-English dictionary in 1955, and an English-Cebuano dictionary in 1983.
During the Spanish Colonial Period, the Spaniards broadly referred to the speakers of Hiligaynon, Cebuano, Waray, Kinaray-a, and Aklanon as Visaya and made no distinctions among these languages.

Geographical distribution

As of the 2020 statistics released by the Philippine Statistics Authority, the current number of households that speak Cebuano is approximately 1.72 million and around 6.5% of the country's population speak it inside their home. However, in a journal published in 2020, the number of speakers is estimated to be 15.9 million which in turn based it on a 2019 study.
Cebuano is spoken in the provinces of Cebu, Bohol, Siquijor, Negros Oriental, northeastern Negros Occidental, southern Masbate, western portions of Leyte and Biliran, and a large portion of Mindanao, notably the urban areas of Zamboanga Peninsula, Northern Mindanao, Davao Region, Caraga and some parts of Soccsksargen. It is also spoken in some remote barangays of San Francisco and San Andres in Quezon Province in Luzon, due to its geographical contact with Cebuano-speaking parts of Burias Island in Masbate. Some dialects of Cebuano have different names for the language. Cebuano speakers from Cebu are mainly called "Cebuano" while those from Bohol are "Boholano" or "Bol-anon". Cebuano speakers in Leyte identify their dialect as Kanâ meaning that. Speakers in Mindanao and Luzon refer to the language simply as Binisayâ or Bisayà.

History

The Cebuano language is a descendant of the hypothesized reconstructed Proto-Philippine language, which in turn descended from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, making it distantly related to many languages in Maritime Southeast Asia, including Indonesian and Malay. The earlier forms of the language are hard to trace as a result of lack of documents written using the language through different time periods and also because the natives used to write on easily perishable material rather than on processed paper or parchment.
The earliest record of the Cebuano language was first documented in a list of words compiled by Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian explorer who was part of Ferdinand Magellan's 1521 expedition. While there is evidence of a writing system for the language, its use appears to have been sporadic. Spaniards recorded the Visayan script, which was called kudlit-kabadlit by the natives. Although Spanish chroniclers Francisco Alcina and Antonio de Morga wrote that almost every native was literate in the 17th century CE, it appears to have been exaggerated as accounted for lack of physical evidence and contradicting reports of different accounts. A report from 1567 CE describes how the natives wrote the language, and stated that the natives learned it from the Malays, but a century later another report claimed that the Visayan natives learned it from the Tagalogs. Despite the confirmation of the usage of baybayin in the region, the documents of the language being written in it other than Latin between the 17th century CE and 18th century CE are now rare. In the 18th century CE, Francisco Encina, a Spanish priest, compiled a grammar book on the language, but his work was published sometime only by the early 19th century CE. The priest recorded the letters of the Latin alphabet used for the language, and in a separate report, his name was listed as the recorder of the non-Latin characters used by the natives.
Cebuano written literature is generally agreed to have started with Vicente Yap Sotto, who wrote "Maming" in 1901, but earlier he wrote a more patriotic piece of literature that was published a year later after Maming because of American censorship during the US occupation of the Philippines. However, there existed a piece that was more of a conduct book rather than a fully defined story itself, written in 1852 by Fray Antonio Ubeda de la Santísima Trinidad.

Phonology

Vowels

Below is the vowel system of Cebuano with their corresponding letter representation in angular brackets:

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

an open front unrounded vowel similar to English "father"
an open-mid front unrounded vowel similar to English "bed"
a close front unrounded vowel similar to English "machine"
a close-mid back rounded vowel similar to English "forty"
a close back rounded vowel similar to English "flute"

Sometimes, may also be pronounced as the open-mid back unrounded vowel ; or as the near-close near-front unrounded vowel ; and or as the open-mid back rounded vowel or the near-close near-back rounded vowel .
During the precolonial and Spanish period, Cebuano had only three vowel phonemes:, and. This was later expanded to five vowels with the introduction of Spanish. As a consequence, the vowels or, as well as or, are still mostly allophones. They can be freely switched with each other without losing their meaning, though it may sound strange to a native listener, depending on their dialect. The vowel can be pronounced as either or, or as immediately after the consonant. Loanwords, however, are usually more conservative in their orthography and pronunciation.
There are only four diphthongs, since and are allophones. These are,,, and.

Consonants

For Cebuano consonants, all the stops are unaspirated. The velar nasal occurs in all positions, including at the beginning of a word. The glottal stop is most commonly encountered in between two vowels, but can also appear in all positions.
Like in Tagalog, glottal stops are usually not indicated in writing. When indicated, it is commonly written as a hyphen or an apostrophe if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word. More formally, when it occurs at the end of the word, it is indicated by a circumflex accent if both a stress and a glottal stop occurs at the final vowel ; or a grave accent if the glottal stop occurs at the final vowel, but the stress occurs at the penultimate syllable.
Below is a chart of Cebuano consonants with their corresponding letter representation in parentheses:
In certain dialects, may be interchanged with in between vowels and vice versa depending on the following conditions:

If is in between and /, the vowel succeeding is usually dropped.
If is in between / and, it is the vowel that is preceding that is instead dropped
If is in between two like vowels, the may be dropped completely and the vowel lengthened. For example, dalá, becomes da ; and tulód becomes tud. Except if the l is in between closed syllables or is in the beginning of the penultimate syllable; in which case, the is dropped along with one of the vowels, and no lengthening occurs. For example, kalatkat, "climb", becomes katkat.

A final can also be replaced with in certain areas in Bohol. In very rare cases in Cebu, may also be replaced with in between the vowels and /.
In some parts of Bohol and Southern Leyte, is also often replaced with when it is in the beginning of a syllable. It can also happen even if the is at the final position of the syllable and the word, but only if it is moved to the initial position by the addition of the affix -a. For example, baboy can not become baboj, but baboya can become baboja.
All of the above substitutions are considered allophonic and do not change the meaning of the word.
In rarer instances, the consonant might also be replaced with when it is in between two vowels, but and are not considered allophones, though they may have been in the past.