Southern Alta (other known names and dialect names) KabuluenKabulowan or Kabuluwan, Kabuluwen, Ita, Beluga, Pugot), is a distinctive Aeta language of the mountains of northern Philippines. This article will discuss Southern Alta's location, vocabulary, similarities and differences shared with other languages, as well as how it has become an endangered language of the Philippines. Southern Alta is one of many endangered languages that risks being lost if it is not passed on by current speakers.

Southern Alta is not close to Northern Alta or to other languages of Luzon. Both Northern and Southern Alta have a significant proportion of vocabulary that is unique to each other, however, they are also very different from the other. Many Southern Alta also interact primarily with Tagalog speakers, sharing similarities between both languages (Reid).

Southern Alta is spoken primarily in the Sierra Madre of eastern Nueva Ecija and in nearby coastal areas of Quezon Province (Reid 1991:2). Lawrence Reid (1991) collected data from San Miguel, located east of Rio Chico, a barrio (barangay) of General Tinio, Nueva Ecija. The range of Southern Alta speakers is bounded by that of the south, there are Southern Alta reported to be living further south near Norzagaray in Bulacan.

Southern Alta is a critically endangered language and has very few speakers. Southern Alta currently has a population of 1,000.

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References[edit | edit source]

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  1. Southern Alta at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016)
  3. Reid, Lawrence A. 1994. "Possible Non-Austronesian Lexical Elements in Philippine Negrito Languages." In Oceanic Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Jun. 1994), pp. 37-72.
  4. Reid, Lawrence. The Alta Languages of the Philippines (1991)
  5. Reid, Lawrence. Who Are the Philippine Negritos? Evidence from Language (2013)
  6. Dutton, Tom. Tyron, Darrell. Language Contact and Change in the Austronesian World (1994)
  7. Southern Alta https://www.ethnologue.com/language/agy (2017)
  8. Southern Alta Language http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/sout2905 (2017)