Cultural keywords in Philippine English

Following Williams’s (1976) seminal work on cultural keywords in English, other language researchers have embraced the term, applying different methodologies (both qualitative and quantitative) to identifying them. They find sets of keywords (larger and smaller) in British, Australian, and South Asian Englishes, using synchronic rather than diachronic approaches to identifying them. This chapter uses diachronic evidence to demonstrate the durability of some Philippine cultural keywords through major historical and language changes in the speech community. It uses early and modern lexical records to document a set of 20 words that survive from the Spanish colonial regime, were taken up into Tagalog, and thence transferred into C20 Philippine English. These Spanish-derived keywords (e.g. poblacion, sala, mestizo, lola) are culture-specific in representing and reflecting profound social changes in the Philippines, as seen in their usage in data from the GloWbE corpus (Global Web-based English, 2012). They illustrate the legacy from Spanish colonialism present in C21 Philippine English: cultural keywords continuing in various socio-semantic fields.