So guys, do you think there has been a recent decline of the Ilocano language? If so how?
Don’t know. My long time hairdresser was Ilocano, but he was born and grew up on Maui. I don’t know if he spoke the language.
Why don’t you first share your thoughts on this language and how you see it’s current usage is increasing or decreasing.
The question is it really spoken in California because I went there twice and I gave not heard a single huy there speaking iloko
Are you familiar with the term “confirmation bias”?
You mean you were surprised not to find anyone in California speaking a language native to “Northern Luzon, many parts of Central Luzon and a few parts of the Soccsksargen region in Mindanao” and spoken by about six million people? I can understand why you were surprised. (Sarcasm.)
It says the language is spoken in California but I haven’t seen anyone speaking the language there
I assume you talked to all 40 million residents of the Golden State?
They were there TWICE, Dewey - of course it was a comprehensive sampling!
As I mentioned above, I knew someone of Ilocano ancestry who could have spoken the language. We’re in California. Guess you missed him.
I don’t know him
@Dorjan pleas be calm
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If you did happened to run into the odd person speaking Ilocano in California, would you even know what you were hearing? I would guess no because a familiarity with the language would imply that you have a decent knowledge of its distribution, which you clearly do not.
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Would it kill you to start a language topic in here with your well-researched thoughts and opinions instead of weird one-liners? It would be much more engaging for everyone involved You are the self-professed language nerd, we should be learning some interesting things from you.
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How old are you?
Calm down. You have been moderated once
Does the OP have any other interests?
Anyway, I work for an aging care agency in Washington state. Some of our clients have translation needs, Tagalog, Farsi, Spanish, etc.
We recently had an Ilocano client come on board. This was apparently novel, because in addition to their individual paperwork getting sent for translation, we had to get the state HQ to translate generic forms for the first time. But now everyone statewide has Ilocano signature forms for the next person.
Moderating:
This is an inappropriately personal attack outside of the pit. This will be a warning.
The mods will also discuss your posting patterns.
I can’t find any website with the number of Ilocano speakers in California, but I can find websites with the ten languages (other than English and Spanish) most commonly spoken in California. The least spoken of those ten languages is only a little over a hundred thousand. The number of speakers of Ilocano in California is probably only a few tens of thousands, although it might be much less than that. Probably somewhat less than one person in 1,000 in California speaks Ilocano. It’s very unlikely that in two short visits to California that you would meet an Ilocano speaker and know that this person speaks it. After all, did you ask everyone that you met on those two visits what languages they spoke?
Let’s go back to the question asked in the first post. Yes, the number of speakers of Ilocano is slowly decreasing. You can see that in this website:
The Philippines are a large country, but there are a lot of languages spoken there. The ones with the most speakers are still increasing in the number of speakers, but the ones that are somewhat below that are slightly decreasing in the number of speakers. Given that Ilocano still has about 11 million speakers, it’s not going to die out soon, but it will continue to decrease in the number of speakers (probably) for decades or even centuries.
Ok so you are saying, the Ilocano is not dying out but it will remain at worse condition probably
A lot of this comes down to political conditions.
Tagalog has the advantage of being an official language of the Republic of the Philippines. My impression from casual acquaintance with Philippine history is that most of the political power is centers in the Tagalog areas of southern Luzon because the colonial powers set up shop in their areas and made their deals with them, not the tribes further south or north. Manilla was the capital going back centuries (to the early Spanish colonial era), and that’s the Tagalog heartland.
So much of the political power functions and expresses itself in Tagalog. That puts the other regional languages (such as Ilocano) at a practical disadvantage. Even if Tagalog isn’t your native language, you still have to be fluent in it to deal with the government or consume any media based out of the major metropolitan areas.