Theories about the origin of the Spanish-lexified creoles of the Philippines known as Chabacano have been based on scarce historical samples. This article presents two early Chabacano texts that are more than twenty years older than the ones that have been available so far: ‘La Buyera’, from 1859, and ‘Juancho’, from 1860. Based on a comparison with historical and contemporary sources pertaining to Philippine-Spanish contact varieties, the texts are placed in their linguistic and sociohistorical context. A linguistic analysis of the texts reveals a clear pattern of creole features and suggests that there was probably sociolinguistically motivated variation in different settings where the Chabacano varieties emerged. The results of the analysis confirm that Chabacano existed as a crystallized variety by at least the mid-19th century and was not restricted to interactions between servants and Spanish-speaking masters or to commercial contexts. Rather, it was already a language used for social and intimate relations and daily interactions in diverse neighborhoods of Manila.

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This paper examines negation patterns in Ternate Chabacano and compares them to negation in Tagalog. Ternate Chabacano is a Spanish-lexified creole spoken in Manila Bay in the Philippines. Tagalog is its main adstrate language. The main pattern in negation is one of the features that has been attributed to the Philippine languages, but it has not been systematically compared with the adstrate language. The comparison reveals that the properties of the Tagalog negator wala in particular have influenced the use of nwáy in Ternate Chabacano in existential negation and in negative indefinite constructions. Also, certain features related to negation follow Tagalog patterns.

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This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.