SEAlang Library Chavacano Dictionary

About the SEAlang Library Chavacano Resources
SEAlang's Chavacano dictionary is based on A composite dictionary of Philippine Creole Spanish (PCS) by Maria Isabelita O. Riego de Dios (Studies in Philippine Linguistics 1987:7.2; used by permission).

Chavacano has nearly one million speakers, primarily in the Philippines, and is a Spanish-based creole. De Dios's dictionary pays special attention to the Cotabato dialect, but places it in the context of three better-known variants: Ternate, Cavite, and Zamboanga.

The original text has about 6,500 entries, including both heads and derived forms. In preparing this material, we have:

-- normalised the phonemic renditions, accenting any stressed syllable,

-- expanded all derived forms, which are shown only by affix (e.g. -an) in the text,

-- marked translated example sentences, and extracted them for use in the bitext corpus,

-- extracted additional information, such as etymology, as available, and

-- allowed search via any (or all) dialects.

Examples
Search for anghel or anghelito, then try the different display settings:

-- self shows the item,

-- self/parent shows the item and its root,

-- family adds other derived and compound forms as well. You can get the whole family by searching for the root as well.

Note also the examples checkbox (in the menu), and buttons. Try searching for duro or chokolate:

-- local shows examples that were found under this head.

-- remote shows examples that were found under other heads (shown in bold).

Searching
Searches may:

-- include an asterisk -- * -- as a wildcard that matches any number of characters; asterisks may appear in any position.

-- require matches for both, or either, Chavacano text (of the headword), or English text (in the definition).

-- be expanded to return the root form, or of all inflected forms that share the same root.

-- be limited to particular part-of-speech.

-- finally, the English search term can be expanded (default) to include inflected forms (a search for sing matches sings, singing, sang, sung as well).

Copyright notices
A composite dictionary of Philippine Creole Spanish (PCS) is copyright 1989 by the Linguistic Society of the Philippines and Summer Institute of Lingusitics, and is used by permission.