Recent Relexification Processes in Philippine Creole Spanish

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses recent relexification processes in Philippine Creole Spanish. Creole languages are a class of languages that share certain features and many grammatical markers are similar from one Creole language to another. The changes taking place are not unique to Creoles, they also occur in other noncreole Philippine languages. Ternateno is the first language of almost all of the people of Ternate and young people are the main innovators of new English and Tagalog terms. English grammatical forms that survive as artefacts include bakwet “evacuees”. The verb form in Ternateno is distinguished by addition of e- and stress change: ebakwet. Mardika terms focus around the manners of personal behaviour and the terms that are most resistant to disappearance from Ternateno are marinerelated. The lexicon continue to grow, with the current trend of many more words entering the language than dropping from it, and some words becoming specialized in meaning but very few generalizing.