Kevin Samejon

DISSERTATION: “National identity and regionality among Philippine English speakers in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu: A variationist study of alveolar fricative production”

ABSTRACT

English, while a remnant of colonial history, has been argued to have developed into an indigenized variety known as ‘Philippine English’ in post-colonial Philippine society. A major claim supporting this view is that English spoken in the Philippines is phonologically homogeneous, lacking identifiable ethnolinguistic influences when used by educated speakers. While this claim builds on previous scholarship, it fails to account for recurring variation in the production of certain sounds among English speakers in the country. One such sound is the phoneme /z/, which is absent from Cebuano and Tagalog yet has consistently been reported to vary when these speakers use English. However, prior explanations have largely attributed this variation to speakers’ educational backgrounds, leaving other potential factors unexamined. This dissertation investigates the production of word-final /z/ in the English spoken in the Philippines by analyzing how linguistic, social, and contact-related factors shape its realization. We challenge the notion of linguistic homogeneity and argue that a more nuanced understanding of English in the Philippines requires moving beyond idealized perspectives of the English language and instead leveraging the methodological strengths of variationist sociolinguistic analysis.

The primary data for this dissertation came from sociolinguistic fieldwork in two metropolitan areas in the Philippines, representing two major ethnolinguistic groups: (1) Metro Manila, where English bilinguals predominantly have a Tagalog language background, and (2) Metro Cebu, where English bilinguals primarily speak Cebuano as their non-English language. Additionally, we include speakers who migrated between these two regions, enabling comparisons between those who constitute a linguistic minority in their current metro area (five Tagalog-English, and five Cebuano-English speakers) and those who have remained in their place of origin (eight Tagalog-English, and eight Cebuano-English speakers). A total of 26 speakers participated in the study. Our phonetic analysis focuses on the production of two alveolar fricatives in a reading passage task: /s/, which is shared between English and both non-English Philippine languages under consideration (i.e., Cebuano and Tagalog), and /z/, which is found only in English. Results reveal that Cebuano and Tagalog speakers exhibit differences in their production of word-final /s/ in their non-English Philippine languages. However, they appear to converge—homogenize, so to speak—in their production of English word-final /s/, but not in their production of English word-final /z/. These findings present evidence for both phonological homogeneity while also demonstrating that social factors, such as non-English Philippine language background, contribute to heterogeneity in /z/-voicing.

Beyond describing variation in English spoken in the Philippines, this dissertation offers the first phonetic documentation of alveolar fricatives in Tagalog and Cebuano. The findings underscore the importance of refining methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks for investigating the phonology of English in the archipelago. While linguistic factors primarily condition the observed variation, subsegmental differences point to the influence of social factors—particularly speakers’ valuation of their non-English languages, and their colonial and post-colonial histories—an aspect often underappreciated in the scholarship of English spoken in the Philippines. Finally, given that word-final /z/-(de)voicing has been identified as a feature in other Asian varieties of English, our results may have broader implications for understanding phonological variation in post-colonial societies across the region.

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