Investigating and describing Philippine English through its form, function and structure

Jayou Oh

Philippine English research has an established tradition which began with Llamzon (1969) and, as such, the variety of English is now deemed to be one of the most researched postcolonial Englishes (Borlongan 2023: 4). Within the framework of World Englishes and Kachru’s (1985) concentric circles of world Englishes model, Philippine English also happens to be one of the very few Outer Circle varieties of English tracing its immediate roots to American English as a consequence of American colonialism (Schneider 2023: 142). As a recognised nativised variety of English, there have accordingly been several attempts to provide a systematic and grammatical description of Philippine English based on its perceived features (e.g. Bautista 2000; Dita 2025). At the same time, there exists continued exonormative orientation towards American English such as in teaching contexts (Schneider 2023: 152), and a number of purported features associated with Philippine English are either also found in other varieties or co-exist with American English forms. The goal is then to ascertain what makes Philippine English its own unique variety on the levels of morphosyntax and discourse-pragmatics.

This dissertation thus seeks to provide an updated and more nuanced view of what characterises Philippine English through the use of both self-compiled and existing corpora – collections of newspapers, academic writing and literature among others – by examining the variety in greater detail than hitherto done before. Using corpus data, multifactorial analyses are conducted alongside descriptive statistical and qualitative methods to study noticeable language variation as present in Philippine English while simultaneously taking into account the possible roles of sociocultural history, language contact and social attitudes to make sense of the way the English variety is used. The interest therefore lies in addressing what users of Philippine English say and how they use the variety in which contexts for what purpose and why they (may) use it the way they do. It is desired that through this research, an improved description of an approximate standard Philippine English based on its supraregional form can be supplied.