Talk:Philippine Spanish/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Sky Harbor (talk · contribs) 14:40, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: ThaesOfereode (talk · contribs) 01:35, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

A linguistics article! Love to see these crop up at GA (and FA)! This article is in great condition as is. I have made a few comments on prose and one on OR. Following fixes here, I will begin a source review and get this article promoted soon thereafter. Thanks for all the great work you did contributing to this article! ThaesOfereode (talk) 01:35, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	See below for prose issues.
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.
2. Verifiable with no original research, as shown by a source spot-check:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.	Solid use of {{sfn}} throughout.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	Source review to follow.
	2c. it contains no original research.	See below. Will reevaluate after source review as well.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.	Earwig shows a low number here and much of the source material is in Spanish so overlap is low anyway.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.	No complaints about coverage whatsoever. Excellent job.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).	Ut supra.
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	Ut supra.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	Looks good.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.	Three images. Two public domain, one uploaded by nominator with appropriate license (thank you!).
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.	Absolutely.
	7. Overall assessment.	Excellent article. Minor fixes needed below.

Prose comments:

• Estimates as to the number of Spanish speakers in the Philippines vary widely, with estimates ranging from the thousands to the millions. – Well, just one million at the high end, right? Maybe try Estimates as to the number of Spanish speakers in the Philippines vary widely, with estimates ranging from the low thousands to about one million.
• in 2023 Maria Luisa Young, professor of Spanish and head of the Department of Modern Languages at the Ateneo de Manila University, estimated without confidence that around 500,000 people in the Philippines either speak or at least know Spanish. – This sounds like a professor eyeballing a random number. Is there some reason we should consider this accurate? In this case, what does "without confidence" mean, strictly speaking?
• though only counting Spaniards in the Philippines as native speakers – Ethnic Spanish Filipinos or Spanish citizens in the Philippines? I suspect the former, but it's unclear.
• various Chavacano dialects in the total [...] → various dialects of Chavacano, a Spanish-based creole, in the total [...]
• a 2020 estimate places the number of native speakers at around 4,000 people – By whom? By the Statistics Authority?
• complicated by the Philippine government's not keeping updated official statistics – Unless Philippine English.
• which would later become Filipino → which later became Filipino per WP:INTOTHEWOULDS
• Before close vowels (/i/ and /u/), – Can we get an example of post-/u/ palatalization? This would be a very odd change cross-linguistically.
• syllable-final S-dropping – Decapitalize "S".
• notably among older Zamboagueño speakers – What does "Zamboagueño" mean?
• even in situations where the polite pronoun usted would be used instead – Consider linking would be used instead to T–V distinction.
• various Chavacano dialects developed the use of voseo, this development is absent in Philippine Spanish, which is exclusively tuteante – What is tuteante? T use only?
• which is normally considered incorrect in standard Spanish – I don't think this source is carrying the weight of this claim. Consider which has been formally proscribed in standard Spanish or something similar.
• Because Spanish-speaking Filipinos are also fluent in English – Some? Most? All?

OR concerns:

• Lipski 1986a, p. 46 does not demonstrate the pronunciation of serbesa nor use it as an example at all; I don't see it on the page. Is it possible you have the wrong page?

Again, great work. Looking forward to seeing this pass GA shortly. ThaesOfereode (talk) 01:35, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi, ThaesOfereode, and thank you for taking the time to review the article. As I'm currently traveling I'll post a few responses clarifying some of the items you asked about, and will get back to the rest shortly.

• On estimates, a few points:
  • The estimates vary very widely. The upper end of the spectrum is actually around two million speakers, but some have noted (and I have come to this conclusion based on conversations I have with people, so I can't put this in the article) that said number, which is attested to Quilis, may in fact be too optimistic. The one million figure provided by El Mundo for me errs on the side of caution, as the issue here is while we shouldn't be overcounting Spanish speakers in the Philippines, we shouldn't be undercounting them either as is the case with the Instituto Cervantes' numbers.
  • Speaking of the IC numbers, "Spaniards in the Philippines" refers to the latter. In the aforementioned report, they rely on the estimate of Spanish citizens in the Philippines from the INE (the Instituto Nacional de Estadística), which in turn gets its numbers from the number of Spanish citizens registered with the Spanish Embassy in Manila. While this number ostensibly includes Spanish Filipinos, some of whom have either retained or reacquired Spanish citizenship, it also includes Spanish citizens who are recent migrants to the Philippines and thus are not considered Spanish Filipinos. Conversely, the number also excludes native Spanish speakers who aren't Spanish citizens, as in the case of people like Guillermo Gómez Rivera.
  • The COOLT article where the 4,000 figure comes from for native speakers does not directly say where it got that number from. I am inclined to believe it came from the AFLE, or if not from them then from Guillermo Gómez Rivera who is was its director at the time. (Side note: by 2023 he had been replaced by Daisy López, retired professor of Spanish at UP Diliman, as director.)
• Most (if not all) Spanish-speaking Filipinos are fluent in English, as it is the dominant foreign language in the Philippines today. That is actually addressed in the "Status and future" section, which is attributed to Lipski.
• I replaced the example of serbesa with sirko ("circus"), which has a source including the specific word as an example. In the previous example, the phenomenon was detailed but the example was implied.

I'll make the aforementioned requested stylistic changes and will note accordingly which ones have been made. Thank you for your review and your patience. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 12:48, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

No worries about the traveling; I will keep the GAN open until you're able to finish working on it. Thanks for letting me know. Responding to your comments below:

• The highest estimate I see cited is four million (using Andrés Barrenechea 2013, p. 33), which I didn't look at before commenting. WP:THESIS recommends against the use of Master's theses unless they have had significant influence and it doesn't seem like the Gómez Rivera source cited in the thesis is better (online magazine, but it's not clear the general reliability). For what it's worth, if you can demonstrate Andrés Barrenechea published the thesis as a monograph with a scholarly press, I will allow it. The IC and El Mundo are better sources. I agree about neither overcounting nor undercounting, but we have duties to WP:V and WP:RS.
• Okay, this is not what I expected. There are almost half a million Spanish citizens living in the Philippines? Why would the IC only collect information about them and not other potential Spanish speakers? This feels very odd and potentially useless metric for guessing how many speakers live in the country at large.
• The COOLT number doesn't stand up to even mild scrutiny, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding something (which is totally possible). The source says: "En dos generaciones el idioma prácticamente se extinguió y en la actualidad lo mantienen vivo alrededor de 4.000 hablantes, un escaso 0,5 % del total de la población filipina." Now, my Spanish isn't good, but this number is not right. The Philippines has a population of roughly 117.3 million; 0.5% of that would be around 586,500 people, which is much more in line with what other sources are saying. Where did 4,000 come from? Where did 0.5% come from? Gómez Armas appears to be a fairly reliable author, but we need to clarify what this statement really is trying to say. Did she accidentally use the same number from the previous paragraph and the editor just didn't catch it?
• Okay, put "most" and cite Lipski. That should take care of it.
• Yeah, it's always better to have a cited example in linguistics. Other processes can often disrupt reasonable extrapolations in phonology.

I hope these comments are helpful. I look forward to getting this page to GA soon. ThaesOfereode (talk) 17:37, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi again, ThaesOfereode, and greetings from Peru. To address some of the stylistic points you raised:

• I removed the "would" as requested from Tagalog becoming Filipino
• I linked Spanish-based creole languages for describing Chavacano
• "would be used instead" is linked to T-V distinction in the world's languages#Spanish. I will edit that article to include a reference to Philippine Spanish as over there it is not mentioned (but Equatoguinean Spanish, which exhibits the same trait, is).
• I removed tuteante (tuteante means using the pronoun tú) with something more explicit in English: "which exclusively uses tú"
• The phrase "which is normally considered incorrect in standard Spanish", which is what I was taught in school if you are wondering where that came from, has been replaced with your recommended "which has been formally proscribed in standard Spanish"

I will find an example of post-u palatalization (these would be words like diurético or ciudad) when I get a hold of La lengua española en Filipinas when I return to Spain. Now, to address the issue of numbers:

• First, I did some additional research to better contextualize this issue, so there are a few new sources cited in that section (namely: another Manila Times article by Jorge Mojarro, an Elcano report by Ángel Badillo Matos, a journal article by Claudia Pattinaro, and a chapter from Mauro Fernández who used to be the director of the IC in Manila). This partially serves to reduce the reliance on the Andrés Barrenechea thesis while making the same argument, and also to better clarify that getting to accurate numbers is, unfortunately, very hard.
• On the thesis specifically, I need to point out that there aren't that many outlets left that talk about Spanish in the Philippines that are written by Spanish Filipinos. The Revista Filipina is largely an academic publication, and is arguably the only major Spanish-language Philippine academic outlet left, which is why I would argue that the Andrés Barrenechea dissertation is valid given the dearth of scholarship on Spanish in the modern-day Philippines. That said, I am hoping that the additional sources I cited earlier helps reduce reliance on the thesis while still making the same points (and, hopefully, even explaining them better).
• With respect, you are misreading the IC's numbers, so allow me to clarify. The number you see there is the total number of speakers, counting first- (native) and second-language speakers. Of the ~465,000 people the report says exists, only 4,500 or so are first-language speakers, and the way the IC extrapolated that data is by counting only Spanish citizens in the Philippines as native speakers (of which there are 4,500; add on the numbers of Latin Americans and you get closer to 5,000, but they could be undercounting). Everyone else is considered to be second-language speakers, which is also unreliable in this case as they include Chavacano speakers. Chavacano speakers don't speak Spanish, although they have some command of it. To that end, I clarified this by using the IC's terminology: "native" and "limited competence" speakers.
• The COOLT number refers to native speakers. I imagine it was a mistake that was not caught by the editors, and that number corresponds to various estimates that are found in other sources. That said, I think this can be addressed by another source (Badillo Matos), who wrote that the actual number of native speakers may be impossible to determine.

Looking forward to any other thoughts that you may have. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 23:57, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

How fitting to be in a Spanish-speaking country as we work on this! I hope Peru treats you well; everyone I know who has gone there has had nothing short of wonderful things to say. New edits have improved the article. Comments below:

• Re: post-u palatalization, your two examples are post-i palatalizations. Ciudad's etymons all begin with ci- (Latin civitas and Old Spanish cibdat). For us to say post-u palatalization we should see something like /tu/ → /t͡ʃu/ or /su/ → /ʃu/ without any intermediaries between the consonant and vowel (except maybe /w/ or /ʷ/). What you are describing is not a post-u palatalization, but rather essentially a yod-coalescence or, as you have correctly identified in the article, affrication (though assibilation may be most appropriate for the motion from a palatal [cf. the description of assibiliation at Weise's law]).
• Re: thesis, I've been moved by the strength of the argument. I didn't see that it had been published in a scientific journal; that's entirely my bad. For what it's worth, I think the argument against (vetted) theses is overblown and the comment about having sources from Spanish Filipinos holds significant water with me.
• Re: IC's numbers, okay I'm following now. Is there any way we can make this more clear in the article?
• Re: COOLT, I'm inclined to remove their line from this section. The reliability of that statement has been rendered unintelligible by the editors; we cannot reasonably ascertain whether the editor should have kept the 0.5% number (in line with Ateneo de Manila University and the IC's full-count estimate) or the 4,000 number (in line with the number of Spanish citizens in the country). I think we should just say it's probably impossible to determine and move on.

New comments as I read through again:

• Found some WP:WEASELs:

• Philippine Spanish has been described by some as being
• though it has been said that within

• Quillis & Casado Fresnillo (2008) describe palatalization before /e/ ("El fonema /s/ se palataliza ante vocal palatal – más ante /i/ que ante /e/ –, siguiendo la tendencia de las mencionadas lenguas autóctonas", p. 90) which you haven't mentioned; might be worth adding.
• Similarly, Lipski (1986b) writes that "many speakers" of Philippine Spanish uses the apicoalveolar fricative [s̠] "though this is not uniform" (p. 40). I don't know why he uses [ś], but we should not use it here.
• From a technical perspective, final /s/ in Spanish is not aspirated; it's debuccalized (see more at Spanish dialects and varieties § Debuccalization of coda /s/). For the sake of precision, I think we should use the term debuccalization (/s/ → [h]) rather than aspiration ([sʰ]).

Hope this is helpful. ThaesOfereode (talk) 02:23, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Hello again, ThaesOfereode, and thank you for your inputs.

• In an attempt to better explain the IC's numbers, I've added a notes section which better explains how the groups came about and how they came up with the numbers in question.
• I am of the opinion that given the wide variance of numbers, it is important that we report on all of them while adding sufficient context. I am inclined to keep the COOLT article (and also the number cited by Maria Luisa Young, in fact) around because while the numbers may have been inappropriately handled by the outlet's editor(s), it is important that people be given as much information as possible and they be able to draw conclusions from what is presented, while we present the numbers in as objective a manner as possible. I think in this situation more information is better than less, so long as we treat the numbers with care and add as much information as possible. That said, if this number is an issue I can revert to the 2008 numbers (6,000, as cited in Abad Liñán) in the infobox and remove the sentence accordingly, or propose some other treatment.
• Weasel terms have been removed and the sentences in question made more declarative.
• As you're probably aware, debuccalization in Spanish is also called aspiration (and in Spanish, it is only called aspiración; the word desbucalización, which would be a literal translation from the English, does not exist). That said, I linked to debuccalization in that section and pointed it out accordingly.

For the more linguistic aspects of your review, I will try to get my hands on La lengua española en Filipinas to better explain what Quilis and Casado-Fresnillo were writing about, as the Google Books preview is limited. I appreciate your patience. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 23:47, 17 November 2024 (UTC)