About this project

I grew up speaking Siargaonon. I built this because nobody had written it down.

Who I am

I am a native Siargaonon speaker from Siargao Island, in Surigao del Norte, Philippines. Siargaonon is the language I was raised in — the language of my family, my neighbours, and the people I grew up around. I am not a linguist, and this is not an academic project. Everything here is the language as I actually speak it and hear it spoken.

Why this exists

A few years ago I went looking for Siargaonon on the internet — a dictionary, a phrasebook, anything — and found essentially nothing. A handful of scattered word lists. No grammar. No audio. Meanwhile Siargao filled with visitors, and children on the island started answering their grandparents in English.

A language that is never written down does not fade gracefully. It vanishes, and takes everything encoded in it with it. So I started writing.

How it is made

Every word, phrase, grammar rule and pronunciation note on this site has been written or checked by me, personally. Where I was uncertain, I left it out. Where I was wrong — and I have been — I corrected it and said so.

The app that accompanies this site is free. Level 1 requires no account at all. Later levels can be unlocked by learning, or bought outright by anyone who would rather not wait; that money keeps the project running. Nothing about the reference material on this site is behind a paywall, and it never will be — the dictionary, the grammar and the pronunciation guide are free, complete, and open to anyone.

This record is not finished

It cannot be. A language belongs to everyone who speaks it, and no one person holds all of it. There are words in your family that are not in mine. There are villages on Siargao that would phrase things differently to how I have.

If you speak Siargaonon and something here is wrong, or missing, tell me. I read every message. Corrections are published with credit to the person who sent them.

What Is Actually In Here

As of today this record holds 386 core vocabulary entries across 5 levels and 29 topics, plus several hundred more contributed by learners and speakers and verified before publication — over 750 in the live dictionary, 53 documented grammar rules in 10 sections, 15 written phrase stories, and 320 audio recordings — every one of them my own voice, recorded for this project.

The site itself runs to 48 pages. None of it is scraped, translated by machine, or copied from another dictionary, because there was no other dictionary to copy from. That was the whole problem.

How a Word Gets In

Nothing appears here because software suggested it. Every entry has passed through the same route: it is either a word I grew up using, or a word someone sent in that I recognised and could vouch for.

Suggestions arrive through the app. I read each one, correct the spelling if it needs it, add the meaning, and only then does it become part of the record. Words I cannot vouch for do not go in. Contributors are credited by name where they give one.

The same rule governs the AI tutor in the app. It is locked to this verified vocabulary and cannot invent Siargaonon — when it builds a sentence from words it knows, that sentence is marked as composed rather than speaker-checked. An invented word that looks plausible is worse than no word at all, because it enters the record and nobody can tell later.

Why the Recordings Matter More Than the Spellings

A spelling is a guess at a sound. Siargaonon has features that written English cannot carry: the J is always hard, as in jump, and never softens to a Y. The L between vowels frequently becomes a Y — ulo becomes uyo. Neither of those survives a written transcription intact.

So every word I can record, I record. Not a synthesised voice reading a spelling back — an actual speaker saying an actual word. When you tap a green phrase in the app, that is my voice, and it is the closest thing to hearing it from someone on the island.

What Happens to This If I Stop

If this project is ever abandoned or left unmaintained, the core word list and grammar notes will be released publicly under an open licence. That promise is written into the terms.

The point was never to own Siargaonon. It was to make sure it is written down somewhere before the people who speak it stop being able to check my work.