Ivatan language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since June 2006. (help, talk)

Ivatan
Spoken in:	Philippines
Region:	Batanes Islands
Total speakers:	35,000 (Population includes 3,448 Itbayatan)
Language family:	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Borneo-Philippines Bashiic Ivatan
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`phi`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	`ivv`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

The Ivatan language, also known as Ibatan, is an Austronesian language spoken exclusively in the Batanes Islands in the most northern reaches of the Philippines. With the islands' proximity to Taiwan, the language is closer linguistically and philologically to Taiwanese aborigine languages than to other Philippine languages. However, the language is not placed in the Formosan languages group.

It is especially characterized by its words, which mostly have the letter 'v', as in vakul, Ivatan, and valuga. Letter 'e', is pronounced as the schwa oun, or 'uh', as in Dios Mamajes, 'di-yos-ma-ma-huhs', and palek 'pa-luhk'. The Ivatan language is completely different from the rest of the other Philippine languages, having been isolated, and is more closely associated with the Taiwanese aborigines, especially the Yami group.