The origins of invented vocabulary in a utopian Philippine language

Abstract

Abstract The utopian Eskayan language and script has been spoken for at least three generations by a small community on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Speakers, who use the language in special domains, attribute its creation to a legendary ancestor known as Pinay. In this paper I consider the origins of Eskayan vocabulary, showing how lexical models from Cebuano, Spanish and English account for a small proportion of Eskayan lexemes. The traces of these colonial languages lend important clues to the development of the lexicon as a whole, shedding light on the tumultuous historical context in which Eskayan came into being. Further, the patterning of Eskayan vocabulary reveals Pinay’s folklinguistic conceptions about the nature of ‘language’ and linguistic variation.