By Robert Blust

1. The Greater Central Philippines
Hypothesis
ROBERT BLUST
University of Hawaii

2. The Evidence for Proto-Philippines
All Philippine languages developed in situ, and are
daughters of a single parent language called Proto-
Philippines.
EVIDENCE: cognate sets
For example:
Dumagat: amiyan (northeast monsoon)
Ilokano: amian
Hiligaynon: aminh-an
Cebuano: amihan
Maranao: amian

3. BUT, THERE ARE PROBLEMS:
Most scholars believed that Proto-Austronesian was
spoken in Taiwan.
Direction of the
Austronesian
expansion:
1. Southward
into the Philippines
2. Westward into
Borneo, mainland Southeast Asia, Sumatra and
Madagascar
3. Eastward into Sulawesi, Moluccas and the Pacific

4. Philippine Microgroups (Blust, 1991)
1. Bashiic – Yami of Botel tobago Island and Itbayaten and Ivatan
2. Cordilleran – Agta, Atta, Balangaw, Bontok, Casiguran…
3. Central Luzon – Kapampangan, Bolinao, Sambal
4. Inati – Negrito population in Panay
5. Kalamian – Kalamian Tagbanwa and Agutaynon
6. GCP (Central Philippines, South
Mangyan, Palawanic, Manobo, Danaw, Suban
un, Gorontalic)
7. Bilic – Bilaan, T‟boli
8. Sangiric – Northern peninsula of Sulawesi in Indonesia
9. Minahasan – vicinity of Lake Tondano in Sulawesi

5. Assumption:
Tagalog, Bikol, Bisayan complex, South Mangyan
(but not North Mangyan), the Palawanic
languages, all of the languages of Mindanao except
the South Mindanao group and the Gorontalo-
Mongondow languages of Sulawesi
continue an immediate protolanguage called
Greater Central Philippines.

6. Philippine Language
• To any language native to the Philippine
Islands without regard to its genetic
affiliation.
• To any member of a putative subgroup of
Austronesian Language most members of
which are located in the Philippine Island.

7. • Blake (1906:318) Languages in the
Philippines as a “subdivision of the Malay
branch of the Malayo Polynesian family of
Speech”
• Philippine subgroup: its members included
& only the languages in the Philippine
archipelago

8. FACTS:
Almost the entire central region of the
Bisayas and southern Luzon
constitutes an extended dialect network
with roughly 45 million first-
language speakers of
Tagalog, Bikol and intergrading
varieties of Bisayas

9. Linguistic diversity show
surprisingly high degree of
homogeneity...
The linguistic history of the central Philippines
included a major episode of linguistic
expansion/ extinction.
Proto-Greater Central Philippines
- name of the hypothetical language brought
about the linguistic levelling in the Bisayas and
Southern Luzon.
Expansion of Proto-Greater Central Philippines

10. Central Philippine languages
predominate to the almost total
exclusion of others.
WHY IS THIS SO?

11. Evidence of GCP expansion:
1. Unexpectedly low level of linguistic diversity in
southern Luzon, Bisayas and Northeast
Mindanao.
2. Gorontalic languages of northern Sulawesi linked
with languages of the central Philippines
3. Presence of „the strereotyped g‟, referring to
sporadic instances of *R > g in languages which
normally reflect PPH *R as some other phoneme.

12. Again, GCP Hypothesis:
• History of related languages is not always
a uniform process of differentiation and
divergence…
but may be punctuated by important
episodes of extinction.
Speakers of PGCP underwent a dramatic
territorial expansion, probably from a
homeland in northern Mindanao or southern
Visayas.

13. TIMELINE:
4 500 BP – earliest radiocarbon dates accepted for a
Neolithic presence (initial Austronesian
settlement)
3 500 BP – break-up of Proto-Philippines; separation
of the Philippine Languages
- Philippines must have been home to
various descendants of Proto-Malayo-
Polynesian
“The how and why of such an expansion probably
will never be known”, said Blust.

15. Circa 3 500 BP,
• Austronesian languages started to be
thinly distributed throughout the
Philippine Islands, but were confined
to a fairly narrow range of
environments, including only the
coastal zones of the larger islands.

16. The Proto-Philippine territorial expansion
covered a greater territory and led to more
widespread linguistic levelling.
Because of Austronesian colonization,
1. Linguistic clock was „reset‟.
2. Divergence began anew from a
single founding community.
3. Language displacement
-historical events led to language expansion
and extinction.

17. As a result of
contact, Austronesian languages
were adopted, and this happened
throughout the Philippine
archipelago.

18. Some words:
*alut : shave off
Cebuano – alut
Western Bukidnon Manobo – alut
Maranao – alot
Gorontalo – waluto
*ebu : cough
Tagalog – ubo
Bikol – abo
Aklanon – ubo (h)
Cebuano - ubu

19. Austronesian culture history:
some linguistic inferences and their
relations to the archaeological record
ROBERT BLUST
University of Hawaii

20. • Historical linguistics can illuminate
fragments of the human cultural past
that are often irrecoverable from the
archaeological record.
• Evidences may be:
– Mutually corroboratory
– Contradictory

21. • Comparative method was used.
– To reconstruct culture history.
– To illustrate the ways in which tools
may complement, corroborate, or
contradict the independent
testimony of archaeology.

22. Striking example of partial
agreement between linguistic and
archaeological inferences involves
the…
PIG
Sediq (north central Formosa) – babui
Kankanabu (south central Formosa) – baburu
Paiwan (southern Formosa) – vavui
Tagalog – baboy
Sulawesi – wawu

23. CONCLUSIONS
Austronesian speakers were sedentary
villagers who possessed:
(1) Sophisticated maritime technology
(2) Root and grain crops
(3) Pig, dog, fowl
(4) Pottery
(5) Knowledge of iron and loom
(6) Indigenous syllabary