Eskayan is the language of the Eskaya

Eskaya

The Eskaya, less commonly known as the Visayan-Eskaya, is the collective name for the members of a cultural minority found in Bohol, Philippines. The Eskaya community is distinguished by its cultural heritage, particularly its literature and language, although many of its earlier traditional...

 cultural minority of Bohol

Bohol

Bohol is an island province of the Philippines located in the Central Visayas region, consisting of Bohol Island and 75 minor surrounding islands. Its capital is Tagbilaran City. With a land area of and a coastline long, Bohol is the tenth largest island of the Philippines...

, an island province of the Philippines

Philippines

The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...

. Relatively little is known about this speech variety which has been the object of occasional media attention in the Philippines since the 1980s. While Eskayan has no mother-tongue speakers, it is taught by volunteers in at least three cultural schools in the southeast interior of the province.
Eskayan has a number of idiosyncrasies that have attracted wide interest. One of its most immediately remarkable features is its unique writing system of over 1000 syllabic characters, all said to be modelled on parts of the human body. Also significant is its syntactic and morphological relationship to Boholano-Visayan

Cebuano language

Cebuano, referred to by most of its speakers as Bisaya , is an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines by about 20 million people mostly in the Central Visayas. It is the most widely spoken of the languages within the so-named Bisayan subgroup and is closely related to other Filipino...

, the dominant language of Bohol and some surrounding provinces.

The earliest attested document written in Eskayan provisionally dates from 1908 and was on display at the Bohol Museum until September 2006.

Classification

Eskayan shows no consistent lexical similarity to any languages spoken in its vicinity, which has prompted broad speculation about its origins. Over the years, languages as far flung as Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Phoenician

Phoenician languages

Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called "Canaan" in Phoenician, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, "Phoenicia" in Greek and Latin, and "Pūt" in Ancient Egyptian. Phoenician is a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup; its closest living relative is Hebrew, to...

, Biblical Hebrew, Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

, Etruscan

Etruscan language

The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...

, and Arabic have all been linked to Eskayan without success. Comparative studies have since indicated that although Eskayan shows no credible lexical relationship with any tested language, apart from a good number of Spanish words (some with their meanings changed, such as astro 'sun' (from 'star') and tre 'two' (from 'three'), and only a few from Cebuano

Cebuano language

Cebuano, referred to by most of its speakers as Bisaya , is an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines by about 20 million people mostly in the Central Visayas. It is the most widely spoken of the languages within the so-named Bisayan subgroup and is closely related to other Filipino...

, it displays a manifest grammatical and semantic relationship with Boholano-Visayan. That is, many Eskayan words and grammatical elements have semantically equivalent counterparts in Boholano-Visayan. The most plausible explanation is that Eskayan is an auxiliary or secret language encoded from Boholano-Visayan. This theory is consistent with the Eskaya written legend Pinay, which tells of how an ancestor was instructed to create the language and script, basing it on the human anatomy. Indigenous auxiliary languages with accompanying creation myths are attested elsewhere in the world. One notable case is the Damin

Damin

Damin was a ceremonial language register used by the advanced initiated men of the Lardil and the Yangkaal tribes in Aboriginal Australia. Both inhabit islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Lardil on Mornington Island, the largest island of the Wesley Group, and the Yangkaal and Forsyth Islands...

 ceremonial language of the Gulf of Carpentaria

Gulf of Carpentaria

The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large, shallow sea enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the Arafura Sea...

 which is derived from the (natural) Lardil language and is said to have been the creation of the ancestor Kalthad. Another example is the auxiliary Pandanus Language spoken in Medan region of Papua New Guinea.
Whatever the origins of Eskayan, structural comparisons show that it is grammatically Cebuano while the age and origin of Eskayan words remains a mystery.

Writing system

The Eskayan script has both alphabetic and syllabic components. A basic 'alphabet' of 46 characters accounts for most of the common sounds and syllables used in Eskayan while a broader subset totalling over 1000 is used to represent the remaining syllables. The unusual diversity of consonant and vowel clusters accounts for this relatively large number of composite characters, which even includes superfluous symbols.
The symbols are said to be based on parts of the human anatomy, though many are clearly based on the cursive roman alphabet.

Romanised orthography

A romanised form of Eskayan is used in the cultural schools for the purpose of exposition. Although not strictly standardised, this orthography has elements in common with the Spanish system once used for transliterating Cebuano. E.g., the letters
‘i’ and ‘e’ are interchangeable symbols representing the sound /ɪ/; the ‘ll’ combination is pronounced /lj/ and the letter ‘c’ will be pronounced /s/ when it precedes a frontal vowel as per Spanish. A notable innovation in Eskayan romanised orthography is the letter combination ‘chd’ which represents the sound /d͡ʒ/.

Phonology and phonotactics

Eskayan shares all the same phonemes as Boholano-Visayan (the particular variety of Cebuano spoken on Bohol) and even includes the distinctive Boholano voiced palatal affricate /d͡ʒ/ that appears in Visayan words such as maayo [maʔad͡ʒo] (‘good’). With the exception of this phoneme, Eskayan shares the same basic phonology as Cebuano-Visayan, Tagalog and many other Philippine languages.
The phonotactics of Eskayan, on the other hand, are quite different from those of Boholano-Visayan and Philippine languages generally. This can be seen in Eskayan words such as bosdipir [bosdɪpɪr] (‘eel’), guinposlan [ɡɪnposlan] (‘face’), ilcdo [ɪlkdo] (‘knee’) and estrapirado [ɪstrapɪrado] (‘flower’) that contain consonant sequences like /sd/, /np/, /sl/, /lkd/ and /str/ which do not feature in Philippine languages. Furthermore, a significant number of Eskayan words have phonemic sequences that are common in Spanish or in Spanish loans into Boholano-Visayan but appear rarely, if ever, in non-borrowed words.

Case system

Eskayan conforms to the same syntactic and morphological structure as Cebuano. As such, Eskayan nouns are uninflected but may be marked for case with one of several preceding case markers.

The table below shows the basic case system of Eskayan, with Cebuano equivalents in brackets.

Personal name marker		Non-personal name marker
nominative	ye or e (si)	Specific (article)	esto (ang)
possessive	kon (ni)	Oblique specific	ya (sa)
dative	puy (kang)	Oblique non-specific	chda (ug)

Pronouns

Eskayan personal pronouns are also marked by case. In the table below, the Cebuano equivalents are indicated in brackets. (These pronouns are drawn from a limited corpus; omissions are indicated by [] and uncertainties with an asterisk.)

	Absolutive	Genitive₁ (Preposed)	Genitive₂ (Postposed)	Oblique
1st person singular	naren (ako, ko)	damo (akong)	tompoy (nako, ko)	tompoy (kanako, nako)
2nd person singular	samo (ikaw, ka)	gona (imong)	nistro (nimo, mo)	nistro (kanimo, nimo)
3rd person singular	atcil (siya)	chdel (iyang)	kon chdil (niya)	mininos* (kaniya, niya)
1st person plural inclusive	arhitika (kita, ta)	chdaro (atong)	[] (nato)	[] (kanato, nato)
1st person plural exclusive	kim (kami, mi)	gramyu (among)	[] (namo)	[] (kanamo, namo)
2nd person plural	chdicto (kamo, mo)	[] (inyong)	[] (ninyo)	[] (kaninyo, ninyo)
3rd person plural	[] (sila)	persiyan (ilang)	[] (nila)	[] (kanila, nila)

Cebuano influences

Despite its structural equivalence to Eskayan, Cebuano has had a very limited lexical influence on the language. In a comparison of core Swadesh vocabulary, there are eight identifiable cognates.

English	Eskayan	Cebuano
at	ya	sa
that	cano	ka'na
we (inclusive/exclusive)	arhitika/kim	kita/kami
who	kinya	kinsa
four	pat	upat
six	nom	un'um
eight	wal	walo
nine	sem	siam

Spanish influences

Although the Eskayan lexicon bears a marked Spanish influence, the loan-patterns are hard to map. Some Spanish words appear to have been directly borrowed into Eskayan with virtually no semantic or phonetic alterations. E.g., the Eskayan word merido, meaning ‘husband’, is evidently loaned from the Spanish marido, also meaning ‘husband’. Others retain only a few of the semantic properties of the original. E.g., the word astro means ‘sun’ in Eskayan but ‘star’ in Spanish. In some interesting cases Eskayan lexical items appear to be borrowed but are assigned new meanings entirely. E.g., the Eskayan memorya (‘sky’) does not coincide semantically with the Spanish memoria (‘memory’). One of the most intriguing examples of such an ‘interrupted loan’ is that of the Eskayan tre (‘two’) seemingly derived from the Spanish tres (‘three’). Here the semantic property of ‘number’ was retained but the actual quantity it represented was reassigned.

Theories and controversies

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Eskaya community attracted the interest of local mystics who promoted the notion that their language was of exotic origin. Today, the few linguists who have examined Eskayan generally concur that it is structurally Cebuano but lexically irregular. The implication of these two premises is that Eskayan is an auxiliary language or a highly sophisticated form of disguised speech encoded from Cebuano. This raises further questions as to what the auxiliary functions of the language might have been – e.g., liturgical, political, military – and when precisely it came into existence.

Additional readings

• Galambao, Marciana. "The Eskaya Language", The University of Hawaii
  University of Hawaii
  The University of Hawaii System, formally the University of Hawaii and popularly known as UH, is a public, co-educational college and university system that confers associate, bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees through three university campuses, seven community college campuses, an employment...
  
  .
• Kelly, Piers. The Classification of the Eskaya language of Bohol A research report submitted to the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Bohol, The Philippines. July 2006.
• Kelly, Piers. "Phd thesis project, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University
  Australian National University
  The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...
  
  .
• Santos, Hector. " The Eskaya Script" in A Philippine Leaf. US, January 25, 1997.
• Santos, Hector. " Butuan Silver Strip Deciphered?" in A Philippine Leaf. US, October 28, 1996