The Boholano Language

IJsselstein, Tuesday, 31 January 2006 (updated: Wednesday, 14 April 2010)

On Bohol, most people speak Cebuano, or, to be more exact, the local dialect of Cebuano, called Boholano. It differs in some respect from the Cebuano spoken on Cebu. For example:

However, you will not face too much trouble making yourself understood on Bohol. Many people speak English, and almost all speak standard Cebuano as well as Tagalog.

The names used for languages in the central Philippines are somewhat confusing, to say the least. As the central group of islands is called Visaya (or more properly Bisaya, as there is no V in any of the languages spoken there), some people call Cebuano 'Visayan' or 'Bisayan' (Binisaya), however this term is confusing, as this name is also applied to Hiligaynon (also known as Ilonggo), spoken on Panay and in Negros Occidental, and Waray-Waray, spoken on Leyte and Samar. The Cebuano language is spoken on Cebu, Bohol, and Siquijor and parts of Negros, Northern Mindanao, and Leyte. Adding to the confusion is that many Filipino's call these languages dialects, even though they are quite distinct in many aspects, similar to the differences between English, Dutch, and German.

Of the three main Bisayan languages, Cebuano is the most common, spoken by about a third of the Philippine population and first language to more Filipino's than any other language, including Tagalog.

As a side note, also in Borneo, there is a people calling themselves Bisaya, speaking yet another language called, you guess it, Bisaya. The historical connection is of course that most Filipino Bisayans migrated to their current homeland some 1000 years ago. In a semi-literate population (the language had its own script before the Spanish conquest), separated by seas and mountains, a language can change a lot in such a span of time, so again this language is unintelligible to Filipino Bisayans, just as much as most English speakers won't be able to make much of Anglo Saxon.

Learning Cebuano

Since Cebuano has no official status, or government support, there are not that many books available to help you learn Cebuano. In local bookshops, you'll sometimes find small phrase-books, that are not very useful to learn the language. However, if you search a little, some good materials can be found. We've prepared on overview of Cebuano Learning materials on this site.

If that is all you need, this site also has a short Cebuano Phrase Book available.

Courses and Grammars

On-line, a number of sites are available to help you learn Cebuano. Tom Marking has prepared a large PDF file with his study notes. Other sites with Cebuano material are learncebuano.com and livingincebu.com.

Freely available from ERIC is the Cebuano Language Packet, prepared for the US Peace Corps Volunteers.

Mark Rubrico has a number of Philippine language courses, on his site Languagelinks.org, including Cebuano. They also sell the Cebuano course Magbinisaya Kita ("Let us speak Visayan") by Jessie Grace Rubrico.

You can also buy A Handbook of Cebuano by the Filipino-Finnish couple Anssi and Nida Räisänen.

Older is Cebuano for Beginners by Maria Bunye and Elsa Yap. Published in 1971, this comprehensive 836 page intensive course was originally intended for Peace corps volunteers.

Similar in scope is Beginning Cebuano, in two volumes by John U. Wolff, which appeared in 1966 and 1967. The second volume is still available from Yale university, but not very useful without having first completed the first volume, which only very rarely appears in second hand bookshops. Wolff's course is designed for both classroom use, and self-study with the help of a Cebuano speaker.

One drawback of Wolff's book is that it does not follow the common way of writing Cebuano. Although the use of the letter q for the glottal stop is very clear, it takes some time to get used to.

Mainly of historical interest are a number of Cebuano grammars that can be found on Google Books. Those all were published before 1923, and use use the old, Spanish based orthography. Furthermore, they often try to force the grammatical concepts of Latin on Cebuano, which has a completely different structure.

Dictionaries

Good dictionaries for Cebuano are also quite hard to obtain, but a number of good ones exists

On this site, we are busy preparing a search interface on the excellent Cebuano dictionary by John U. Wolff, first published in 1972. Scans of this book are available on line at Cornell University: Vol I (A-K) and Vol II (L-Z). This is the best dictionary available for Cebuano. However, make sure you read the introduction before using it, and understand that it does not use the common orthography.

When completed, this dictionary will replace our limited on-line dictionary of Philippine languages which includes Cebuano, Tagalog, and Ilonggo words.

At bookstores in Cebu, you will probably be able to buy An English-Cebuano Visayan Dictionary by Rodolfo Cabonce. Although comprehensive, this work is more useful to Cebuano speakers who need to look up the meaning of a Cebuano word than for learners of Cebuano who like to find out a word in Cebuano.

Almost simultanous with Wolff's dictionary, in 1971, Maria Bunye and Elsa Yap published their Cebuano-Visayan Dictionary.

More dictionaries are listed on Jessie Grace Rubrico's Review of Cebuano dictinoaries..

Jeroen Hellingman

What readers think...

Read all 68 comments by readers.

Also give your comments on this article

We reserve the right to remove or edit comments posted on this website. Please read our conditions of use for details. You can use <i>italics</i>, <b>bold</b>, <p> new paragraph, <a href="url">link</a>. Other markup will be removed. Use of the forums for advertising is prohibited. Enterprises located in Bohol can request to be added to the business directory.

This article has been viewed 13884 times.