The first one thousand commonly used Hiligaynon words: A Hiligaynon - English compendium for the teaching of mother tongue

Abstract

The implementation of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education under the Enhancement Basic Education Act of 2013 has cause a stir not only to the education sector but to the general public as well. Among teachers and curriculum planners, the scarcity of materials in the regional language training and preparation of teachers posed initial problems, while for the general public, parents included, the popularity of English as a favored language and medium of instruction prevailed as a language perspective and attitude. In an attempt to address both concerns and in support of MTB-MLE, this project was undertaken in order to take look into real life Hiligaynon language through an automated process using a software or computer program initially developed by Leyte Normal University. Known as corpus linguistics, the method used for the study involved encoding into the software Hiligaynon texts both oral and written. The texts used for the project were a mixture of various genre to ensure that the domains in Hiligaynon were represented. A total of 401,323 word language corpus was generated by the software. Out of the corpora that were gathered, the commonly used Hiligaynon lexical items were listed in a compendium or a dictionary containing the definition, pronunciation, synonyms, usage as found in the original texts and part of speech of the generated word.