English in the multilingual ecology of the Philippines: Exploring the sociolinguistics of Cebu City

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Peter Siemund
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528506225

The project investigates the position of English in the multilingual ecology of Cebu City. The Philippines is a relatively strongly anglicized country where English assumes important functions in society. English is widely used in the education system. Philippine English is an extensively researched and well-established member of the World Englishes paradigm. The project strives to advance current research in several respects. First, in making Cebu City its research site, it focuses on the lesser explored area of the Visayas/Bisayas where Cebuano is the native and most widely used Philippine language. The national language Tagalog/Filipino plays a less prominent role there. Second, the project considers English in the context of the other languages in Cebu City, inquiring about the repertoires, functional domains, proficiencies, speakers’ usage patterns including code switching, and attitudes in relation to all languages, not just English. Third, the project aims to study a socio-demographically representative sample of speakers that includes people from all walks of life, levels of education, and age groups. In doing so, the project tries to move beyond the focus on social elites (especially university contexts) that underlies much current research. The project works with an assisted sociolinguistic (online) questionnaire that will be distributed to 180 participants in Cebu City. Participants will be approached heeding socio-demographic parameters such as age, level of education, and gender. In addition, the project will conduct semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with a subsample of 60 participants. Data collection will be primarily based on English. Both data collection efforts will be audio recorded and subsequently transcribed to yield a digital corpus. Field data will be used to reconstruct the multilingual ecology of Cebu City (Haugen 1972) and the Dominant Language Constellations of its speakers (Aronin 2016). The project expects substantial language use variation depending on speakers’ socio-demographic backgrounds that will help to assess the position of English in the local linguistic fabric more precisely. Moreover, the project hopes to reveal hybridizations in language use as much as their underlying language ideologies. As part of a larger Research Unit, project results will be compared with those emanating from Cyprus, Northeast India, Tanzania, Kurdistan Region Iraq, Botswana, and Lagos.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5728: Convergence on Dominant Language Constellations: World Englishes in their local multilingual ecologies (CODILAC)
• International Connection: Australia, Philippines
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Loy Lising; Professor Dr. Aurelio Vilbar