Word for the Travel Wise (10/05/06)

Looks like we’re a day late and a dollar short of visiting the Sinanggiyaw Festival held in Dumanju, Cebu (Philippines), but with careful planning you should be able to catch this annual event and celebration of planting, harvesting and thanksgiving next year. Sounds like a real colorful and exciting time for the both the natives and a wandering tourist.

Today’s word is a Cebuano word used in the Philippines:

sayaw – dance

Seeing how I normally point to Tagalog words when heading to the Philippines for the language feature I’m going to keep the information on Tagalog below. As for Cebuano, it is spoken by approximately 20,000,000 people, most of which are inhabitants of Cebu, Bohol, and Negros Oriental as noted in Wikipedia.

Tagalog is one of the major languages in Central Philippines and part of the Austronesian language family. For some reason I was surprised by the number of free GOOD resources available to prospective Tagalog student. Wikipedia has great background info on the lingo as well as related languages, Bikol, Hiligaynon, Waray-Waray, and Cebuano. Mongabay pretty much covers all the really good, up and running links to sites that help teach Tagalog, after checking out a few I’ll do the favor of pointing the best out. The first is an interactive language and Filipino culture resource site tools are provided for both teachers and students. A pretty intense breakdown on local slang and how it is derived can be found here. Travel Lang has word and phrase generator that spits out all the basic words you’d use while visiting.

Past Filipino/Tagalog words: taon, kalye, alak, masarap