The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines

Abstract

<p>The Eskayan language of Bohol in the southern Philippines has been an object of controversy ever since it came to light in the early 1980s. Written in an unusual script, Eskayan bears no obvious similarity to any known language of the Philippines, a fact that has prompted speculation that it was either displaced from afar, fossilized from the deep past, or invented as an elaborate hoax. This book investigates the history of Eskayan through a systematic review of its writing system, grammar, and lexicon and carefully evaluates written and oral narratives provided by its contemporary speakers. The linguistic analysis largely supports the traditional view that Eskayan was the deliberate creation of a legendary ancestor by the name of Pinay. The study traces the identity of Pinay through the turbulent history of early twentieth-century Bohol when the island suffered a series of catastrophes at the hands of the United States occupation. It was at this time that the ancestor Pinay was channeled by Mariano Datahan, a multilingual prophet who foretold that English and other languages would be abandoned and that Eskayan would one day be spoken by everyone in the world. To make sense of this situation, the book draws on theorizations of postcolonial resistance, language ideology, mimesis, and the utopian political dynamics of highland societies. In so doing, it offers a linguistic and ethnographic history of Eskayan and of the ideologies and historical circumstances that motivated its creation.</p>