This dictionary is a revised and expanded version of the Bontok-English Dictionary, with English Bontok Finder List (Pacific Linguistics, Series C, No. 36, pp. 505, Canberra: Australian National University) that was published in 1976, but which is now out-of-print and out-of-date. It is also a completely reorganized and reprogrammed version of an earlier on-line Talking Dictionary of Bontok (1999) prepared under the auspices of the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Bontok (sometimes also spelled "Bontoc") is the name given to the group of closely related languages which are spoken in the communities of Bontoc, the capital of Mountain Province, one of the provinces of the Cordillera Administrative Region of northern Luzon in the Philippines (http://www.dilg.gov.ph/CAR/about_car_mt.htm).

Bontoc municipality is politically divided into sixteen politically distinct administrative units or barangay, most of which are constituted of geographically distinct villages, each characterized by its own dialect, having distinctive intonation, pronunciation and lexical items. There are also a number of grammatical differences that distinguish even geographically close communities. Many of the dialects are, however, mutually intelligible, with the degree of intelligibility greatest between communities that are geographically close, and less between more distant communities. Together they form a chain of five dialect groups, as shown in Figure 1.






This is a dictionary of one of the Central Bontok communities, Guina-ang, a village of over 500 households, situated about 15 kilometers north of the town of Bontoc. Guina-ang people refer to their language as Khinina-ang, or simply kalimi 'our language'. Equivalent words from eleven of the other barangays of Bontoc municipality will be included as information becomes available and can be entered into the database. These communities are Bontoc Ili, Samoki, Dalican, Ma-init, Maligcong, and Tocucan (which, together with Guina-ang, constitute the Central Bontok dialects); Alab and Balili (two of the South-western Bontok dialects); and Can-eo, Talubin, and Bayyo (the Southern Bontok dialects).

The Bontok language group extends beyond the Bontoc municipality northeast to include the dialects spoken in the Sadanga municipality, or Northern Bontok. To the southeast, it includes the dialects spoken in the Barlig municipality, or Eastern Bontok (also referred to in the literature as Finallig). To the west, it merges into the Kankanay language of the Sagada and Besao municipalities, and to the southwest into the Kankanaey language of the Sabangan, Bauko and Tadian municipalities and Benguet Province. It merges to the east into the Balangao language of Natunin municipality, to the south into the languages of Ifugao Province, and to the north into the languages of Kalinga Province. These languages form part of the Central Cordilleran subgroup of Northern Luzon languages, as shown in Figure 2 and described in Reid (1974a).






This dictionary grew out of a wordlist gathered by the compiler during his first visit to Guina-ang in August, 1959. Subsequently, through extended periods of residence in Guina-ang until 1970 under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Philippines, and in brief annual visits thereafter during the compiler's association with the University of Hawai`i, that wordlist was expanded until it reached its present form.

In recent years, there has been increasing concern raised over the status of minority and under-documented languages, such as Khinina-ang, because of the globalization of English, the pressure of national languages and other factors, to the extent that many languages are no longer being used or fall into the category of seriously endangered. Khinina-ang is one such language. Over the last half century, a wide variety of factors has impacted the indigenous cultures of the Philippines, resulting in a process of cultural homogenization, so that today much of the once distinctive character of these communities has been modified and is in serious danger of being lost. Probably nowhere in the Philippines is this headlong rush to modernization and homogeneity more apparent than in the once conservative areas of the mountain provinces of the Northern Philippines. On the surface, the changes can be easily seen in the shift of housing styles from the traditional thatched-roof to the modern, wood-frame, lowland style with galvanized iron sides and roof. Similarly, loss of traditional artifacts, such as basketry, tools, traditional weapons, and clothing styles can also be readily noted.

Less obvious, but just as real, are the losses of traditional cultural practices associated with rice cultivation and the various complex wedding rituals. But the most insidious of the losses are those that underlie each of the ones just mentioned. Specifically these are the linguistic changes that result when traditional artifacts are no longer used and old cultural practices are discontinued. The indigenous terminology associated with these artifacts and practices is no longer used and children grow up without the knowledge of the rich heritage which is theirs.

Paralleling the obvious cultural changes then are various linguistic changes. Some are directly associated with the loss of cultural artifacts and practices, others are the result of the ever-increasing effect of the prestige dialects of the municipal centers, regional languages, such as Ilokano, the national language, Filipino/Tagalog, and at least one international language, English. The rich, indigenous, linguistic diversity of the past, by which it was possible to unambiguously determine the home village of any mountain person by his distinctive pronunciation and lexicon is giving way to a variety of language use among young people that is impoverished in terms of traditional terminology, and reflects the patterns and vocabulary of one or more of the prestige dialects and languages of the area.

The changes that have taken place in Guina-ang over the last 50 years are typical of those that characterize each of the villages of the Bontoc municipality. In 1959, Guina-ang was a village of around 300 households, all but two of which were traditional, thatched-roofed houses. There was no access by road to the village. There was no electricity, or running water. There were no radios in the village, nor were there any sari-sari 'convenience stores'. There was a public elementary school with four grades and two teachers. Only one girl had started school, but had dropped out because of family pressure. Traditional rituals were widely adhered to, and the language spoken, Khinina-ang, was fairly uniform throughout the community.

Fifty years later, the village has expanded to almost twice its size. There are no remaining traditional houses in which people live. A road to the village has been built, the first jeep reaching Guina-ang in 1982. Today, several jeeps make round trips from Guina-ang to the Bontoc municipal center each day. Piped running water was brought to the village in 1985. The village was electrified in 1992. Today there are at least 10 small convenience stores in the village, and a large majority of homes have small radios. Three rice mills now operate in the village, the first one being introduced in 1985. Cooking practices have changed, with traditional open fires in the houses and charcoal stoves giving way to gas stoves. Most of the traditional basket types, weapons, and tools have disappeared, many having been "antiqued", a new term in the language, referring to cultural artifacts that have been sold to antique dealers from Baguio and Manila. The retreating forest and consequent difficulty of acquiring bamboo and rattan for weaving has resulted in a switch from traditional baskets to plastic and metal containers. Only a few of the older men still remember how to weave. The traditional dormitories for young women (pángis) have all disappeared, and the traditional obfo working system, which depended on the contracted labor of groups of young women with men from specific men's ward houses (ab-afóngan) has also disappeared. Only the oldest men and women still use traditional clothing for everyday apparel.

The little elementary school is now a full elementary and high school, with around 20 teachers. There have been at least 40 college graduates from the village, a number of whom have worked abroad in places as far afield as Florida, New York, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. At least ten overseas workers have returned to the village, supplementing the many retirees from the closed BCI gold mines in Sang-ilo, Antamok, Acopan and Baguio Gold, and others from the mines in Felix and Lepanto who have returned with their families (and acquired wealth) to live in the village.

The major factors then that are resulting in cultural and linguistic change in Guina-ang are those that are at work in each of the Bontok-speaking communities, viz., the movement of young people to areas outside the community for education in places such as Baguio City and Manila, for work opportunities in mines, market gardens, and overseas. Many of these young people meet and marry partners who do not speak their home dialect, and then return to the village. Such close interaction with people from communities other than one's own requires the use of Ilokano (or some other regional language) in order to communicate. Children in these situations grow up hearing only the regional language. When their parents return to the village with the status that education and money bring, children do not acquire the less prestigious local language, or they do so only imperfectly. Furthermore, teachers in the local schools are often from communities other than the local community, and do not speak the local dialect. (In Guina-ang in 2005, only two of eleven elementary school teachers grew up in the village). As school teachers, their dialect is more prestigious than the local dialect. Pre-school children in homes in which the mother is educated are often spoken to in a mixture of English, Ilokano, Central Bontok, and or Kankanay, depending on where the mother received her education.

It was to address these factors, i.e., the loss of cultural and linguistic knowledge of today's young people, not only in Guina-ang, but also in other Bontoc communities, that precipitated the development of this on-line "Talking Dictionary". It is hoped that it will serve as a repository of the way Khinina-ang used to be spoken when the old culture was still vibrant. Nearly every word in the dictionary (and many of the examples) is associated with a sound file so that one can hear how the form was pronounced, and many of the cultural items and activities are accompanied by image files.

Bibliography of Relevant Linguistic and Cultural Materials

Reid, Lawrence A.

1961	a	A Guinaang wedding ceremony. Philippine Sociological Review 9:1-54.
	b	Dancing and music in Guinaang, Bontoc. Philippine Sociological Review 9:55-82.
1963		The phonology of Central Bontoc. Journal of the Polynesian Society 72:21-26.
1964	a	Matrix analysis of Bontoc case-marking particles. Oceanic Linguistics 3:116-137.
	b	A formal analysis of the clause structure of Central Bontoc. M.A. thesis, University of Hawai'i.
1970		Central Bontoc: Sentence, paragraph and discourse. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields No. 27. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
1972		Wards and working groups in Guinaang, Bontoc, Luzon. Anthropos 67:530-563.
1973	a	Diachronic typology of Philippine vowel systems. In Current trends in linguistics 11: Diachronic, areal, and typological linguistics, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 485-506. The Hague and Paris: Mouton and Co.
	b	Kankanay and the problem *R and *l reflexes. In Parangal kay Cecilio Lopez: Essays in honor of Cecilio Lopez on his seventy-fifth birthday, ed. by Andrew Gonzalez, 51-63. Philippine Journal of Linguistics Special Monograph Issue No. 4. Quezon City: Linguistic Society of the Philippines.
	c	(with Domingo Madulid) Some comments on Bontok ethnobotany. Philippine Journal of Linguistics 3(2):1-24.
1974	a	The Central Cordilleran subgroup of Philippine languages. Oceanic Linguistics 13:511-560.
	b	Terms for rice agriculture and terrace building in some Cordilleran languages of the Philippines. In Austronesian terminologies: Continuity and change, ed. by Andrew K. Pawley and Malcolm D. Ross, 363-388. Pacific Linguistics C-127. Canberra: Australian National University.
1976		Bontok-English dictionary, with English Bontoc finder list. Pacific Linguistics C-36. Canberra: Australian National University. Pp. 505.
1992		Guinaang Bontok texts. Institute for the Study of the Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Monograph Series. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of the Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Pp. xv, 306.
2001		On the development of agreement markers in some Northern Philippine languages. In Issues in Austronesian morphology: A focusschrift for Byron W. Bender, ed. by Joel Bradshaw and Kenneth L. Rehg, 235-257. Pacific Linguistics 519. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
2002	a	Determiners, nouns or what? Problems in the analysis of some commonly occurring forms in Philippine languages. Oceanic Linguistics 41(2):295-309.
	b	(with Ritsuko Kikusawa) A Talubin text with a wordlist and grammatical notes.Journal of Asian and African Studies 65:89-148.
2004		(with Hsiu-chuan Liao) A brief syntactic typology of Philippine languages. Language and Linguistics 5(2):433-490.
2005		A cross-generational view of contact-related phenomena in a Philippine language: Phonology. In Sociolinguistics and language education in the Philippines and beyond: Festschrift in honor of Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista, ed. by J. Stephen Quakenbush and Danilo T. Dayag. Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines and the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
2006	a	Human noun pluralization in Northern Luzon languages. In Streams converging into an ocean: Festschrift in honor Professor Paul Jen-Kuei Li on his 70th birthday, ed. by Henry Y. Chang, Lillian M. Huang, and Dah-an Ho. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series, No. W-5. Pp. 49-70. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.
	b	(with Katsura Aoyama) Cross-linguistic tendencies and durational contrasts in geminate consonants: An examination of Guinaang Bontok geminates. Journal of the International Phonetics Association 36(2):145-157.
	c	On the origin of Philippine vowel grades. Oceanic Linguistics 45(2):457-472.
	d	On reconstructing the morphosyntax of Proto-Northern Luzon, Philippines. Philippine Journal of Linguistics 37:1-64.