Conducted by VSU
, Started on 2024 -
Completed on 2025
Completed
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Multilingualism is a fact of life in the Philippine archipelago. With more than 100 languages to date (McFarland, 2004; Eberhard, Simon, & Fennig, 2025), the country fragments into diverse speech communities, ethnic groups, and cultural loyalties. The Visayas, a string of islands located in the middle of the Philippines, exemplifies this diversity. From its eastern to its western portion, a variety of languages can be quickly noticed. Eastern Visayas is dominated by two major Philippine languages: Waray and Cebuano.
Waray, also called Waray-Waray, Samar-Leyte, and Samarenyo, is the language spoken in the northern and eastern part of Leyte and Samar. Cebuano, also known as Binisaya, Sugbuanon, and Bisaya, is spoken in Leyte’s western half and Southern Leyte. These are the parts of Leyte near Cebu or Bohol, two Visayan islands populated by large Cebuano-speaking communities. A few Samar towns, despite being located between Waray-speaking communities, persist in the use of Cebuano as a language of everyday communication. How this happened is yet to be ascertained. According to the 2000 census, there are 2, 560, 000 speakers of Waray and 15, 800, 000 speakers of Cebuano. Both Cebuano and Waray belong to the Central Philippine and Bisayan subgroup of the Austronesian family of languages.
This project investigated dialectal variations of Waray spoken in Carigara, Burauen, and Dulag and Cebuano spoken in Ormoc, Baybay, and Maasin. As far as the scholarly literature is concerned, not much attention has been paid on language variation in the Leyte areas mentioned. While the results of the study was initially thought of to be useful in basic education, as fieldwork progressed, the researchers realized it had broader implications to fields of human endeavor where communication is greatly required such as agriculture, disaster risk reduction management, and health. A knowledge of language variants will give agency to communication stakeholders and in turn, empower their communities to express their thoughts in the variation of their native tongue.