What is Siargaonon?

Siargaonon is the language of Siargao Island, in the Surigao del Norte province of the Philippines. It is spoken every day by the people who live there, and written down almost nowhere.

A Visayan language, not a dialect of Tagalog

Siargaonon belongs to the Visayan branch of the Austronesian languages, closely related to Surigaonon — the two names are often used for the same speech — and more distantly to Cebuano. It is not a dialect of Tagalog, and a Tagalog speaker arriving on Siargao will understand very little of it.

That distinction matters practically, because it is the source of the mistakes visitors make. Tagalog and Siargaonon share vocabulary, and some of that shared vocabulary means different things. The clearest case is mahal: in Tagalog it means love; in Siargaonon it means expensive, and nothing else. Tell someone mahal takaw in Siargao and you have not confessed your feelings — you have called them costly.

What makes it sound like itself

Two features mark Siargaonon out immediately.

The hard J. Where other Philippine languages might soften a J toward a "y" sound, Siargaonon's J is hard — exactly as in the English word "jump". Jaon is JA-on, not YA-on. Sija is SI-ja, never SI-ya. Learners coming from Cebuano or Tagalog get this wrong almost every time, and it is the fastest way to be spotted as an outsider.

The L-to-Y shift. Many words that carry an L in neighbouring languages carry a Y here. Ulo (head) becomes uyo. Balay (house) becomes bayay. Uran (rain) becomes uyan. Once you hear the pattern you cannot unhear it, and it will unlock dozens of words at once.

Why it is disappearing

Siargao has changed quickly. Tourism arrived, then English, then Tagalog through schooling and television. Younger speakers increasingly reach for English colour words rather than the Siargaonon ones; a generation that grew up bilingual is raising children who are more comfortable in another language than in their own.

This is not a complaint about change — languages have always moved. But a language that is never written down disappears without leaving a trace, and Siargaonon is very close to that. There is no comprehensive dictionary. There is no grammar in print. Search the internet for how to say "good morning" in Siargaonon and, until recently, you would find almost nothing.

What this site is

This is one native speaker writing it down: a dictionary of 381 words and phrases, a grammar, a pronunciation guide, and real conversations. All of it free, all of it open, all of it checked by someone who grew up speaking the language.

It is incomplete, and it always will be — a language is bigger than any one person who speaks it. That is why corrections and additions from other speakers are welcomed, reviewed, and published with credit.