The Manila variety of Philippine Hybrid Hokkien (PHH-M) or Lánnang-uè is a contact language used by the
metropolitan Manila Chinese Filipinos; it is primarily comprised of Hokkien, Tagalog/Filipino, and English elements. Approaching PHH-M as a
mixed language, we investigate linguistically and socially conditioned variation in the monophthongs of PHH-M, focusing on the extent to
which the vowel systems of the three source languages have converged. This analysis draws on data gathered from 34 native speakers; Pillai
scores are calculated to assess the degree of merger. Contrary to certain predictions of prior work on mixed languages, PHH-M is found to
have a unified, eight-vowel inventory distinct from any of its sources. Older women use more stable vowels across source languages,
suggesting that they have led in the development of PHH-M as a mixed code; however, signs of change among younger women suggest either the
endangerment of the code or its evolution in response to the community’s shifting identity. We contextualize our conclusions in relation to
the sociohistory and language ecology of metropolitan Manila’s Chinese Filipino community.
Ang See, Teresita. 1990. The Chinese in the Philippines: Problems and Perspectives (Volume 11). Manila: Kaisa Para sa Kaunlaran.
Ang See, Teresita. 2004. The Chinese in the Philippines: Problems and Perspectives (Volume 31). Manila: Kaisa Para sa Kaunlaran.
Bakker, Peter. 1997. ‘A Language of our Own’: The genesis of Michif – the mixed Cree-French language of the Canadian Métis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bakker, Peter. 2003. Mixed languages as autonomous systems. In Yaron Matras & Peter Bakker (eds.), The mixed language debate: Theoretical and empirical advances, 107–150. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Balukas, Colleen, & Koops, Christian. 2015. Spanish-English bilingual voice onset time in spontaneous code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism 19(4): 423–443.
Bautista, Lourdes S. & Bolton, Kingley. 2008. Philippine English: Linguistic and literary perspectives. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2017. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.31, Retrieved 21 August 2017 from [URL]
Chu, Richard T.2010. Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila. Leiden, the Netherlands & Boston, MA: Brill.
Chua, Amy. 2003. World on fire: How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability. New York: Doubleday.
Chua, Dorothy Ang. 2004. From Chinese to Filipino: Changing identities of the Chinese in the Philippines. Unpublished MA thesis. Vancouver: University of British Columbia.
Deterding, David. 1997. The formants of monophthong vowels in standard Southern British English pronunciation. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 271: 47–55.
Deterding, David. 2007. The vowels of the different ethnic groups in Singapore. In David Prescott, Andy Kirkpatrick, Isabel Martin & Azirah Hashim (eds.), English in Southeast Asia: Literacies, Literatures and Varieties, 2–29. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Doeppers, Daniel F.1986. Destination, selection and turnover among Chinese migrants to Philippine cities in the nineteenth century. Journal of Historical Geography 12(4): 381–401.
Eckert, Penelope. 1989. The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation. Language Variation and Change 1(3): 245–267.
Fabricius, Anne H., Dominic Watt, & Daniel Ezra Johnson. 2009. A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change 211:413–435.
Golovko, Evgenij V.1994. Mednyj Aleut or Copper Island Aleut: an Aleut-Russian mixed language. In Peter Bakker & Maarten Mous (eds.), Mixed languages: 15 case studies in language intertwining, 113–121. Amsterdam: Uitgave IFOTT.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong. 2016. Trilingual code-switching using quantitative lenses: An exploratory study on Hokaglish. Philippine Journal of Linguistics 471:109–131.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong. 2018. Philippine Hybrid Hokkien as a postcolonial mixed language: Evidence from nominal derivational affixation mixing. Singapore: National University of Singapore thesis.
Gonzalez, Andrew. 1970. Acoustic correlates of accent, rhythm, and intonation in Tagalog. Phonetica 221: 11–44.
Grosjean, François. 2010. Bilingual. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Grosjean, François, & Joanne L. Miller. 1994. Going in and out of languages: An example of bilingual flexibility. Psychological Science 5(4): 201–206.
Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2010. Improved representation of variance in measures of vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 91: 1–10.
Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren, & Katie Drager. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 341: 458–484.
Klöter, Henning. 2011. The language of the Sangleys: A Chinese vernacular in missionary sources of the seventeenth century. Leiden, the Netherlands & Boston, NY: Brill.
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ladefoged, Peter & Keith Johnson. 2011. A course in phonetics. Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
Lesho, Marivic. 2017. Philippine English (Metro Manila acrolect). Journal of the International Phonetic Association: Illustrations of the IPA. 1–14.
Matras, Yaron & Peter Bakker. 2003. The study of mixed languages. In Yaron Matras & Peter Bakker (eds.), The mixed language debate: Theoretical and empirical advances, 1–22. Berlin, Germany & New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.
Meakins, Felicity & Jesse Stewart. In press. Mixed Languages. In Salikoko Mufwene & Anna Maria Escobar (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Muysken, Pieter. 1994. Callahuaya. In Peter Bakker & Maarten Mous (eds.), Mixed languages: 15 case studies in language intertwining, 207–211. Amsterdam: Uitgave IFOTT.
Nycz, Jennifer & Lauren Hall-Lew. 2013. Best practices in measuring vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 201. 1–19.
O’Shannessy, Carmel. 2005. Light Warlpiri: A new language. Australian Journal of Linguistics 25(1): 31–57.
R Core Team (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL [URL]
Schachter, Paul & Fe T. Otanes. 1972. Tagalog reference grammar. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, & London, the United Kingdom: University of California Press.
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1884. Kreolische Studien IV, Ueber das Malaiospaniche der Philippinen. Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-historischen der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 105.
Siu, Phila. 2019. Why are Chinese workers so unpopular in Southeast Asia? South China Morning Post, 2 Jun, 2019. [Retrieved from [URL], 19 November 2019].
Smith, Ian. 1979a. Convergence in South Asia: A creole example. Lingua, 481, 193–222.
Smith, Ian. 1979b. Substrata versus universals in the formation of Sri Lanka Portuguese. In Peter Mühlhäusler (ed.), Papers in Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 21. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Starr, Rebecca L. & Brinda Balasubramaniam. 2019. Variation and change in English /r/ among Tamil Indian Singaporeans. World Englishes 38(4): 630–643.
Stewart, Jesse. 2014. A comparative analysis of Media Lengua and Quichua vowel production. Phonetica 711:159–182.
Stewart, Jesse. 2018. Voice onset time production in Ecuadorian Spanish, Quichua, and Media Lengua. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 481(21): 173–197.
Tayao, Ma. Lourdes G.2004. The evolving study of Philippine English phonology. World Englishes 23(1): 77–90.
Thomas, Erik R. & Tyler Kendall. 2007. NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite. [Online Resource: [URL]]
Thomason, Sarah Grey. 2003. Social factors and linguistic processes in the emergence of stable mixed languages. In Yaron Matras & Peter Bakker, (eds.), The mixed language debate: Theoretical and empirical advances, 21–40. Berlin, Germany & New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Tsai, Huiming. 2017. A study of Philippine Hokkien language. Unpublished PhD dissertation: National Taiwan Normal University.
Uytanlet, Juliet Lee. 2014. The Hybrid Tsinoys: Challenges of Hybridity and Homogeneity as Sociocultural Constructs among the Chinese in the Philippines. PhD dissertation. Asbury Theological Seminary.
Watt, Dominic & Fabricius, Anne. 2002. Evaluation of a technique for improving the mapping of multiple speakers’ vowel spaces in the F1-F2 plane. In D. Nelson, ed. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 91:159–173.
Watt, Dominic & Anne Fabricius. 2011. A measure of variable planar locations anchored on the centroid of the vowel space: A sociophonetic research tool. Proceedings of the 17th ICPhS. Hong Kong, SAR, People’s Republic of China. 2102–2105.
Winford, Donald. 2009. The mixed language debate: Theoretical and empirical advances (review). Language 85(1):223–228.
Winford, Donald. 2013. Social factors in contact languages. In Peter Bakker and Yaron Matras (eds.), Contact languages: A comprehensive guide, 363–416. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
Hafiz, Mohamed, Mie Hiramoto, Jakob R. E. Leimgruber, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales & Jun Jie Lim
2024. Sociolinguistic variation in Colloquial Singapore English sia. World Englishes
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong
2021. Interactions of Sinitic Languages in the Philippines: Sinicization, Filipinization, and Sino-Philippine Language Creation. In The Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies, ► pp. 1 ff.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong
2021. Interactions of Sinitic Languages in the Philippines: Sinicization, Filipinization, and Sino-Philippine Language Creation. In The Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies, ► pp. 1 ff.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong
2021. Filipino, Chinese, neither, or both? The Lannang identity and its relationship with language. Language & Communication 77 ► pp. 5 ff.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong
2022. Interactions of Sinitic Languages in the Philippines: Sinicization, Filipinization, and Sino-Philippine Language Creation. In The Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies, ► pp. 369 ff.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong
2024. Mixed language in flux? The various impacts of multilingual contact on Lánnang-uè’s wh-question system. International Journal of Bilingualism
2024. Philippine Englishes in the Sino‐Philippine Lannang context: Towards a concentric‐pluricentric interactional‐interplanar model of English. World Englishes
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong
2024. Spread, stability, and sociolinguistic variation in multilingual practices: the case of Lánnang-uè and its derivational morphology. International Journal of Multilingualism 21:3 ► pp. 1547 ff.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong
2024. Sociolinguistic Analysis with Missing Metadata? Leveraging Linguistic and Semiotic Resources Through Deep Learning to Investigate English Variation and Change on Twitter. Applied Linguistics
GONZALES, WILKINSON DANIEL WONG
2024. When to (not) split the infinitive: factors governing patterns of syntactic variation in Twitter-style Philippine English. English Language and Linguistics► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.