AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LANGUAGES OF ROMBLON PROVINCE
Jason William Lobel
jasonlobel@hotmail.com 		 
http://sanrokan.com/newsanrokan/archives/jul8/feature_lobel.htm
Monday, July 8, 2002

1. Introduction
  Most linguists doing research on Philippine languages have concentrated on major languages like Tagalog, Ilokano, or Cebuano, or languages in areas that are of political or economic importance to the researcher's institution. By all these criteria, it is not surprising that the topic of "The Languages of Romblon Province" has slipped through the proverbial cracks: None of Romblon's languages-Romblomanon, Asi, and Onhan-are spoken by much more than 100,000 people; Romblon has never been a strategic province for domestic or international affairs; and despite all its beauty with its abundance of world-class marble and unspoiled nature, Romblon isn't the easiest Philippine province to reach, and therefore this cluster of small islands has been overlooked by many researchers.
  Perhaps the first and so far most comprehensive work on the these languages was done by Dr. R. David Zorc in the 1960s-1970s, not as part of a project specifically targeting the languages of Romblon, but as part of the research for his 1975 dissertation titled "The Bisayan Dialects of the Philippines: Subgrouping and Reconstruction". Since then, about the only noteworthy work on any of these languages has been done by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) en route to their goal of publishing the Bible in Asi (a.k.a. Bantoanon) and Romblomanon. The SIL has published such pertinent articles as "Bantoanon Phonology", "Emotion Verbs in Bantoanon", and "The Affix 'pa-' and Movement in Romblomanon". Unfortunately, these papers have not been written with the goal of exploring each language in the context of its related languages, and despite the SIL linguists' sharp transcription and translation skills, the features that have been described are usually found in most of the related Central Philippine languages and therefore have often already been described by other linguists.(1) 
  In this paper, we take the approach that the appreciation and understanding of a language must begin with a good descriptive work that is accessible to all. Therefore, we will take a look here at the Onhan, Asi, and Romblomanon languages, starting with a brief introduction to Romblon and its neighboring islands, then to each of the languages, outlining their position in the Bisayan language group, some of their noteworthy features, and their similarities to and differences from one another.
2. The Province of Romblon
2.1 Geography 
  The province of Romblon consists of 14 islands and islets, the largest of which are Tablas, Sibuyan, and Romblon. Together, the province covers a land area of 1,533.45 sq. km., about half a percent of the total land area of the Philippines. There are a total of 17 municipalities, the most populated of which are Odiongan and Romblon.
  According to the National Statistics Office, preliminary census counts for the year 2000 indicate that 263,922 people live in the 17 municipalities of Romblon province, with about a third of the population split between Odiongan (39,069) and the provincial capital, Romblon (36,612). Another third of the population lives in the towns of Looc (19,898), San Agustin (21,643), Cajidiocan (19,369) and San Fernando (21,214).
  The province of Romblon lies near the center of the Philippines and borders on Mindoro Island to the west, Marinduque Island to the north, Masbate Province to the east, and Panay Island to the south. Its people can be characterized as Bisayan, as they all speak Bisayan languages. In fact, Romblon was part of the province of Capiz on Panay Island from 1818 until 1917. However, it is now politically a part of the 11-province Southern Tagalog Region, although the people of Romblon learn as their first language not Tagalog but one of the three Bisayan languages native to Romblon Province. 
PIC: {jason1.gif}
2.2. Languages
2.2.1. Romblon's Languages and the Austronesian Language Family
  The languages of Romblon, as well as all languages native to the Philippines, belong to the Austronesian language family, which includes languages spoken in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and 25 other countries in insular and mainland Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. It is the 2nd largest language family in the world with 1,262 known languages, second only to the Niger-Congo family's 1,489 languages. All of the languages of the Philippines except Samalan (Blust 1991) are classified as Philippine languages under the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian. The Philippine language group has three main branches: Northern, Southern and Central, the latter of which is composed of the Bisayan, Bikol and Tagalog languages.
  Unlike other islands or provinces in the Philippines where all local languages are classifiable under the same subgroup of languages, the three languages of Romblon each actually belong to a different subgroup of the Bisayan language group. Romblomanon belongs to the Central Bisayan subgroup, which spans from Waray-Waray on Samar and Leyte, through Masbatenyo and Romblomanon, and as far west as Hiligaynon and Capiznon on Panay. Onhan, on the other hand, belongs to the Western Bisayan subgroup, which includes Kinaray-a and Aklanon as well as several minor languages spoken on Mindoro, Palawan, and some small islands in between. Finally, Asi is not classified under any specific subgroup of Bisayan, and instead makes up its own immediate branch of Bisayan.
  It is important to remember that, although linguists subgroup languages by shared similarities and differences in order to discover the historical relationships between these languages, each language may also have similarities to languages from other groups, especially when two languages have been used in close proximity to one another. For example, Onhan, Romblomanon and Asi, although not genetically close beyond all obviously being Bisayan languages, may exhibit mutual similarities due to the fact that they have inhabited the same general area-neighboring islands-for at least a few centuries. They could also be expected to have borrowed from Hiligaynon and Capiznon, due to the fact that Romblon was administrated from Capiz Province for some time. More recently, all of these languages have borrowed from Tagalog, especially since it is used in the media and is taught in schools as the national language of the Philippines.
PIC: {jason2.gif}
Figure 1. Austronesian Family Tree showing the position of the Romblomanon, Onhan and Asi languages (2) 
The following chart shows some lexical items in the three languages of Romblon as well as in the other languages that they are related to.
PIC: {jason3.gif}
2.2.2. Population of Speakers and Location 

  Romblomanon has 110,870 speakers and is the native language throughout Romblon and Sibuyan Islands, as well as in San Agustin town on Tablas Island. Asi has the fewest speakers with 70,371, and is native to the islands of Simara, Banton, Maestro de Campo, as well as the towns of Odiongan and Calatrava on Tablas Island. The "purer" variety of Asi is found in the islands north of Tablas, while the varieties in Odiongan and Calatrava (brought by settlers from Banton) have been influenced by Romblomanon and Onhan. In Romblon Province, the Onhan language is spoken by 83,116 people in the remaining towns of Tablas (excluding Odiongan, Calatrava, and San Agustin), and on Carabao Island. It is also spoken on Boracay and a small part of northwest Panay, where it is considered by the locals to be a dialect of Aklanon, but linguists like Zorc (1977) have classified Onhan as separate from Aklanon under the Western Bisayan branch of the Bisayan language group, so as such we will refer to it as a separate language. Still, there are some similarities between Onhan and Aklanon, and popular accounts on Tablas relate that the Onhans immigrated to Tablas from Panay. 
PIC: {jason4.gif}
3. Language Descriptions
3.1. Asi 
The Asi language is not classified under any subgroup of Bisayan, and instead makes up its own immediate branch of Bisayan. In lay terms, this indicates that the speakers of Asi were probably extremely isolated for hundreds or even a thousand years from the groups speaking other Bisayan languages. Zorc (1977) characterized Asi as "intermediate between West Bisayan and Central Bisayan", and stated in his dissertation that: 
because of its lower scores with most other Bisayan dialects on any of the comparisons used in this study, it may be proposed that the Banton group was one of the first Bisayan groups in the area. Later, after the Romblomanon and West Bisayan dialects moved in and surrounded the group, Banton began to borrow heavily from the (perhaps more prestigious) newcomers, so that its original source was obscured. (p. 278)
Still, with the lack of written language samples and historical records representing pre-Spanish times, we may never know the true origin of the Asi-speaking people.

3.1.1. Phonological Description
  Most Central Philippine languages have a basic phoneme inventory of three vowels /a i u/(3) and 16 consonants / b k d g h l m n ng p r s t w y ? /. Asi has the same inventory of sounds but several phonological changes have taken place in Asi that have not most affected other Central Philippine languages. These are (1) the sound that is pronounced /l/ (or /r/) in most CPh languages is usually pronounced /y/ in Asi; (2) the sound pronounced /d/ in most CPh languages is usually pronounced /r/ in Asi; and (3) the sound pronounced /y/ in most CPh languages is usually pronounced /d/ in Asi.
  While looking odd at first to a reader unfamiliar with the Asi language, meaning can be extracted from Asi words by reverting the y, r, and d to their equivalencies in other CPh languages.
PIC: {jason5.gif}
  In many words there is more than one change that has taken place, but the principles remain the same:
PIC: {jason6.gif}
  Note that in some affixed forms, these changes do not take place:
PIC: {jason7.gif}