Zerah D. Esmero, Sunliegh C. Gador, Karina M. Sumabon
A dialect gives people a view of the standard language and its study helps in the understanding of its usage and its direction of change. According to Trudgill (2004), dialect has something to do with the social and geographical origins of a speaker. It is along this premise that this study was conducted. It analyzed the Porohanon dialect spoken by the people in the island of Poro, Camotes Cebu. Poro, the center of Camotes is the only town in the island that speaks a slightly different dialect called Porohanon while the rest of its towns use the Cebuano language. Specifically, this study focused on identifying the phonetic changes and the dominant syntactic patterns present in the mentioned dialect. The study's main data were gathered from recorded spontaneous conversations of participants which were later on transcribed and further analyzed. The participants were grouped into four, namely: teenagers, elderly locals, working adults such as teachers and police officers, and local market vendors. Results revealed that the Porohanon dialect underwent most of the phonetic changes presented by Crowley (1997). Strengthening or Fortition and Sound Weakening specifically Apheresis, Syncope, Apocope, and Rhotacism and Sound Addition like Epenthesis and Prosthesis were just some of the phonetic changes that were evident in the data. Moreover, the syntactic patterns of the syntactic patterns of the Porohanon dialect were analyzed using the framework of Nolasco (2015). Data showed that the patterns were only P-S, S-P and P-A-O clausal structures. Additionally, although the Porohanon dialect underwent most of the phonetic changes mentioned by Crowley (1997), and that three of the five syntactic patterns asserted by Nolasco (2015) surfaced in the data, the dialect is not quite different from that of Cebuano. It can be said that Porohanon dialect is a variation of Cebuano. This study recommends that in order to further identify the characteristics of a dialect variation, suprasegmental processes such as pitch and tone of voice will be included in the analysis. Also, phonological as well as lexical variations should be studied because these are clear markers of a regional dialect. © 2018 Asian E F L Journal Press. All Rights Reserved.
Department of Communications, Linguistics, and Literature, University of San Carlos, Cebu City, Philippines
