On the orthography of Philippine Creole Spanish in Zamboanga

This article aims to demonstrate the critical importance of corpus-driven language standardization and linguistic expertise in orthography development using Zamboanga Chavacano (henceforth ZC) as a case study. I aim to highlight the inconsistencies between the official orthography and actual usage and make a case for corpus-driven language planning in the development of creole orthographies by analyzing the current official orthography of ZC. Specifically, I will present what the orthographic system of ZC should look like if corpus planning had played a role in the development of the official and standard orthography of ZC. This note discusses this issue based on an analysis of the Contemporary Written Zamboanga Chabacano Corpus (CWZCC) compiled by Himoro (2019) and compares the practices that emerge from the corpus with those used in the officially approved orthography. CWZCC is a comprehensive corpus, consisting of 8,038,200 words from radio scripts, newspapers, news articles, literary pieces (i.e., songs, poems, short stories), public and government documents, certificates, educational materials (e.g., Chavacano lessons in the MTB-MLE), public and commercial signs and/or advertisements, and campaign materials such as posters and tarpaulins, Facebook posts and comments, Twitter posts and comments, blogs, and online forums. The AntConc version 3.5.9, a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordance and text analysis was utilized to establish the word list from the CWZCC. The spelling variants were manually determined and arranged according to the frequency of occurrences.