Philippine English is any variety of English (similar and related to English) native to the Philippines,

including those used by the media and the vast majority of educated Filipinos. English is taught in
schools as one of the two official languages of the country, the other being Filipino (Tagalog). Due to the
strongly bilingual and multilingual nature of the Philippines, code-switching such as Taglish and Bislish is
prevalent across domains from the informal to business and mass media.

Philippine English is a legitimate nativized variety of English. It is the language used by Filipinos in
controlling domains such as science and technology, the judiciary, the legislature, bureaucracy, higher
education, scholarly discourse, and the like. While it shares some of the linguistic properties ascribed to
other varieties of English, especially those used in Asia, it has features that are unique to it. Based on
findings of previous empirical studies, this chapter aims to describe the core linguistic features of
Philippine English at the phonological (segmental and suprasegmental), lexical, grammatical and
discourse levels. It also touches on the international intelligibility of the spoken register of this variety.

Phonology

Philippine English is a rhotic accent mainly due to the influence of Philippine languages, which are the
first language of most of its speakers. Another influence is the rhotic characteristic of General American
English, which became the longstanding standard in the archipelago since Americans introduced the
language in public education.[14][15][16] This is contrary to most Commonwealth English variants
spoken in neighboring countries such as Malaysia or Singapore. The only exception to this rule is the
word Marlboro, which is frequently read as Malboro. Therefore, /r/ phonemes are pronounced in all
positions.[17] Native and well-educated speakers (also called acrolectal speakers[14]) may also feature
flapping and vowel sounds resembling the California vowel shift due to the influence of Hollywood
movies and call center culture.[18]

For non-native speakers, Philippine English phonological features are heavily dependent on the
speaker's mother tongue, although foreign languages such as Spanish also influenced many Filipinos on
the way of pronouncing English words. This is why approximations are very common and so are
hypercorrections. The most distinguishable feature is the lack of fricative consonants, particularly /f/, /v/
and /z/. Another feature is the general absence of the schwa /ə/, and therefore pronounced by its
respective full equivalent vowel although the r-colored variant [ɚ] is increasingly popular in recent
years.

History

Philippine English has evolved tremendously from where it began decades ago. Some decades before
English was officially introduced, if not arguably forced, to the Philippines, the nation had been subject
to Spanish rule and thus Spanish was the language of power and influence. However, in 1898, when the
Spanish gave the United States control of the nation, the English language, although initially disfavored,
became widely used in a matter of years. This was catalyzed by the coming of American teachers called
"Thomasites" (Bolton & Bautista, 2004). Before gaining independence, language policy makers had
already started discussing formation of a common language for the Philippines that today is known as
Filipino. Filipino became the national language, and English was given the status of an official language
of the Philippines; English is the dominant superstrate language, as it is perceived by many as a symbol
of status and power, replacing Spanish as the dominant superstate language. With the English language
highly embedded in Philippine society, it was only a matter of time before the language was indigenized
to the point that it became differentiated from English varieties found in the United States, United
Kingdom, or elsewhere. This, along with the formal introduction of the World Englishes (WE) framework
to English language scholars in the Philippines by renowned linguist Braj B. Kachru, which occurred at a
conference in Manila, opened the floodgates to research on this new emerging English, which has since
been branded as Philippine English.

References

^ Bautista, Ma. Lourdes (2004). "Tagalog-English code-switching as a mode of discourse" (PDF). Asia-
Pacific Education Review. 5 (2): 225–233.

^ Bautista, Ma. Lourdes (1998). "Tagalog-English code-switching and the lexicon of Philippine English".
Asian Englishes. 1 (1): 51–67. doi:10.1080/13488678.1998.10800994.

^ Erwin-Billones, Clark (2012). Code-switching in Filipino newspapers: Expansion of language, culture

and identity (PDF) (Master's). Colorado State University. Retrieved 31 December 2018.

^ Dayag, D. T. (2002). "Code-switching in Philippine print ads: A syntactic-pragmatic description".

Philippine Journal of Linguistics. 33 (1): 34–52.

^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_English