Eskayan
| Eskayan | |
|---|---|
|
Bisaya Iniskaya Eskayano |
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| Created by |
Mariano Datahan Attributed to Pinay, ancestor of the Eskaya clan |
| Date | ca. 1920–1940 |
| Setting and usage | Song, prayer, teaching, reproduction of traditional literature. Intended to establish a distinct indigenous culture on the island of Bohol in the Philippines. |
| Ethnicity | 3,000 (2013) |
| Users | 550 (2013) |
| Purpose |
Cultural auxiliary language
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| Eskayan script (syllabary) | |
| Sources | Encryption of Cebuano, with lexical influence from Spanish and English |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | None |
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Eskayan is an artificial auxiliary language of the Eskaya clan of Bohol, an island province of the Philippines. It is grammatically Boholano, the native language of Bohol, with a substituted lexicon. While Eskayan has no mother-tongue speakers, it is taught by volunteers in at least three cultural schools in the southeast interior of the province.
Eskayan has a number of idiosyncrasies that have attracted wide interest. One of its most immediately remarkable features is its unique writing system of over 1,000 syllabic characters, said to be modeled on parts of the human body, and its non-Philippine lexicon.
The earliest attested document in Eskayan provisionally dates from 1908, and was on display at the Bohol Museum until September 2006.
According to speakers, the Eskaya language and script were creations of Pinay, the ancestor of the Eskaya clan, who was inspired by human anatomy. Pinay’s language was "rediscovered" in the early 20th century by Mariano Datahan (born Mariano Sumatra, ca. 1875–1949), a Messianic rebel soldier who transmitted it to his followers. Datahan had founded a utopian community in southeast Bohol in the aftermath of the Philippine–American War, in order to resist imperial claims and establish an indigenous nation in Bohol, and the Eskayan language and script were seen as the embodiment of this incipient national culture.
Recent research strongly suggests that the Eskayan language was created in the period after Spanish contact had been established. Evidence of this includes the presence of "native" terms (i.e., not borrowed or calqued) for post-contact cultural categories such as "pope" and "aeroplane". Further, the language makes semantic distinctions that are made in Spanish and English but not in Visayan (such as between "moon" and "month"). It is highly plausible that Eskayan vocabulary was created by taking parallel Spanish-English-Visayan wordlists from textbooks, and replacing the Visayan layer with Eskayan. Finally, the Eskayan script bears strong similarities to 19th-century Copperplate handwriting.
Indigenous auxiliary languages with accompanying creation myths are attested elsewhere in the world. One notable case is the Damin ceremonial language of the Gulf of Carpentaria which is said to have been the creation of the ancestor Kalthad; another are the pandanus languages of the Medan region of Papua New Guinea.
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