1. Introduction
The Philippines were incorporated to the Spanish crown in 1571. The capital, Manila was founded by López de Legazpi (originally the Mayor of Mexico City) on 24th June 1571. Spanish achieved rather less success in the Philippines than in the Americas. This appears to be due to a number of factors, primarily the low numbers of Spanish settlers in the islands and the peripheral location of the islands within the Spanish Empire. Fray Miguel de Benavides remarked in 1595:

En México hay ahora innumerables españoles, no sólo de los idos de acá, sino de los naçidos allá, que ya son como naturales de allá [. . .] y no sólo hay esta multitud de españoles en la çiudad de México, sino también en otros ynumerables pueblos, de suerte que ya aquel rreyno y rrepública está aún en la gente muy mudada, lo qual no es ansí en las Philippinas, porque aunque en la çiudad de Manila ay españoles, pero en los pueblos de los yndios no vive español ninguno, y ansí están los pueblos de los yndios sin haçer en ellos mudança ninguna como se estavan antes que los españoles allá fuesen. (Cited p. 206 in L. Hanke, Cuerpo de documentos del siglo XVI, Mexico, FCE, 1977.)

To reach the islands from Spain, the usual route was via Veracruz in Mexico, with an overland journey to Acapulco, to board the Galeón de Manila. Until the opening of the Suez Canal, Spanish communication with the Philippines was conducted entirely through Mexico and indeed throughout the colonial period the Islands formed part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.

Unlike in the Americas then, Spanish never came to be the general language of the Philippines. There were efforts in the late 18th and 19th centuries to expand the provision of free schooling, which involved the obligatory teaching of Spanish. However, the slow process of Hispanization came to an abrupt halt in 1898, when sovereignty was ceded to the USA. The USA spent vast sums on establishing the usage of English in the Islands and on dismantling the educational apparatus set up by the previous administration. From 1935, Spanish and English co-existed as official languages in the Philippines, but in the Philippine Constitution of 1987 this status was withdrawn from Spanish. Thus according to the constitution, Pilipino (i.e. Tagalog) and English are the official languages of communication and instruction, while ‘Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and optional basis’.

While there remains a residual Spanish-speaking population in the Philippines, the most vital Ibero-Romance manifestation in the modern Philippines appears to be Chabacano or Philippine Creole Spanish which, according to Quilis 1996, has about 1.2 million speakers.

Chabacano (also spelled chavacano) is spoken in Ternate and Cavite, in Manila Bay, in Zamboanga and Cotabato on the Island of Mindanao, and also on Basilan Island, to the south of Mindanao. In Manila Bay Chabacano exhibits Tagalog influence, while in the south the influence is from Cebuano. In the description below most of the linguistic examples are from Quilis 1996, which contains a more complete account than that given here.

---

1. Pronunciation
The sound system of Chabacano is not complex. It diverges in the following ways from Spanish, the lexifier language:

1. The voiced obstruents /b, d, g/ are almost always realized as stops, i.e. [b, d, g].
   
2. The dental [d] has been eliminated from the -ado ending, e.g. gente rabiao ‘angry person’.
   
3. Spanish /f/ has been displaced by /p/, as a result of substrate influence: [ˈpondo] < fondo, [ˈpweŋa] < fuera.
   
4. Spanish /x/ surfaces as /h/: [huˈga] < jugar, [ˈhente] < gente.
   
5. Spanish /tʃ/ surfaces either as [ts] or [ʃ]: [ˈpetso] or [ˈpeʃo] < pecho.
   
6. Unlike in most parts of the Spanish-speaking world, /ʎ/ is preserved as a distinct phoneme: [kaˈʎa] < callar, [ˈʎeno] < lleno.
   
7. The Spanish trill /r/ has merged with the tap /ɾ/: [ˈɾosas] < rosas.
   
8. In Zamboanga and Cotabato, the tap /ɾ/ may be pre-aspirated: [ˈtohɾe] < torre, [tohˈɾeɾo] torero.
   
9. Lambdacism of /ɾ/ modification is not uncommon in syllable-final position: [ˈbilhen] < virgen, [ˈtalde] tarde.
   
10. Infinitives end in a stressed vowel, rather than /ɾ/: [haˈbla] < hablar.
    
11. Spanish final /ɾ/ (except in infinitives) usually surfaces as a glottal stop [ʔ], as in [seˈɲoʔ] < señor.
    
12. As happens in local indigenous languages, epenthesis (i.e. insertion) of a glottal stop often occurs immediately before a stressed syllable-initial vowel: [lagɾimeˈʔa] < lagrimea

---

2. Grammar

Word order
The traditional word order of Chabacano is VSO (verb-subject-object). In this respect it converges with the substrate languages Tagalog and Cebuano, but it is also worth remembering that VSO was common (arguably the norm) in Spanish until quite recently (see Zubizarreta 1998). A Chabacano example is given in (1) below:

(1)       Ta mirá Mario cun José
            ‘Mario sees José.’

In the contemporary period, however, the English-style SVO word order is becoming established. Diffusion of SVO order appears to be driven in part by media practice, with news items often being translated from English without adjustment of the basic constituent order.

Article
Chabacano has both a definite and an indefinite article, viz. el and un, but both are invariant:

(2)       el bata
           ‘the boy’

(3)       el voz
           ‘the voice’

(4)       un bata mujer
           ‘the woman’

The contraction del also occurs: debajo del olas.

Morphology
As is typical of creoles, Chabacano has virtually no inflectional morphology, in that nouns, adjectives, verbs and determiners are almost always invariant. In the first place, gender simply is non-existent as a grammatical category, with adjectives being descended from the masculine in Spanish:

(5)       El mujer alto ya andá na plaza.
            ‘The tall woman went to the market.’

(6)       el escuela limpio
            ‘the school is clean’ (see below, example (15), for copula deletion)

Note that, as in many other creoles, masculine or feminine semanticsm can be signalled through agglutination to the base noun of words meaning ‘male’ or ‘female’, viz. macho and mujer. An example is given below:

(7)       el caballo mujer
            the horse woman
           ‘the mare’

As regards grammatical number, plurality in the NP is usually expressed through the particle mana (< Tagalog mga):

(8)       el mana casa
            ‘las casas’

(9)       el mana compañera
            ‘the companions’

Occasionally, suffixation of -s/-es may be used to mark the plural, as in Spanish: rosa → rosas, plor (< flor) → plores. Sometimes both plural formation process may occur at once, as in su mana pulseras ‘her bracelets. Usually, no grammatical plural marker is used with numeric determiners: siete mujer ‘seven women’.

The absence of person and number marking in the verb is offset by the fact that subject pronouns (listed in the table below) are obligatory if there is no lexical subject:

Similarly, the tenselessness of verb forms is compensated by the routine use of pre-verbal particles. The most important of these are ta (present tense), ya (past tense) and either di or ay for the future tense.

Adjectives can usually be used as adverbs: Eli ta clavá bueno el vista ‘He/She stares’, caminá chiquitito ‘to walk in short steps’.

As regards syntactic functions, as in Palenquero these are generally not expressed through inflectional morphology. Con/Cun is used to mark personal direct and indirect objects (in Zamboangueño, con/cun is used also with non-personal direct objects):

(10)       Ya mirá yo cun José.
             ‘I saw José.’

(11)       Nisós ya pidí pabor cun su papang.
             ‘We asked your father for a favor.’

(12)       Ele ya empesá buscá que buscá con el sal.
              ‘He/She began to search everywhere for the salt.’

The preposition na (probably of Portuguese origin) is used in locative and directional constructions:

(13)       Eli ya andá na escuela.
              ‘He/She went to school.’

(14)       Mario ya dormí na casa.
              ‘Mario slept in the house.’

Finally, copula omission is routine (as it is in the substrate languages):

(15)       Yo pilipino.
              ‘I am Philippine.

---

References

Quilis, Antonio. 1996. ‘La lengua española en Filipinas.’ In Manual de dialectología hispánica: el español de América, ed. by Manuel Alvar (Barcelona: Ariel), pp. 233–4.

Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa. 1998. Prosody, Focus and Word Order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.