Language Grafting: Code Mixing Patterns in Ilocano Conversational Language as an Input to the Philippine Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education

Abstract

The Ilocanos are Austronesian language spoken people in the Northern region of the Philippines. With their constant interaction with other cultural and ethnic groups in the Philippines and the influence of media such as television, internet and the like, they speak a variety of language. Oftentimes, they tend to hybridized words by combining it with Filipino or any other local languages. This study aimed to assess the code-mixing patterns used in Ilocano conversations of students of Tumog Elementary School and Tumog National Agricultural School, Philippines. Specifically, it was intended to: identify code- mixed Ilocano language used in conversations through documentation and to determine the patterns in the code mixed words used in Ilocano conversations, The descriptive analysis was employed with notetaking as data gathering tool. Conversations among pupils and students were carefully recorded using cellphone recorder. Based on the finding data and information gathered by the researchers, the following conclusions were drawn. (1) Students of Tumog Elementary School and Tumog National Agricultural School speak a Mongrel variety of Ilocano language with borrowings from the English Language.(2) Students find easier to pick the English counterpart of an Ilocano word to fill lexical gaps in one of his/her languages. (3) There are several prefixes used before certain verbs in English to indicate present, past and future actions such as maka, iy, i, ag, ma [present]; naka, nag, and na[past]; and mak, iy and i, ag and ma [future]. (4) Prefixes for present and future tenses are the same. There are only signal words used to indicate only signal words used to indicate futurity such as nakto..inton bigat (will – tomorrow).