Waray Visayan Morphemes in the Lense of Dialectal Variations

Abstract

Waray Visayan is one of Philippine languages spoken by most of the people in Eastern Visayas Region, Philippines. However, this language is spoken variantly in the different provinces of the region.  This study was conducted to find out the morphemic dialectal variations of Waray Visayan language between Catarman and Calbayog City speech communities in terms of content words and function words.  It was assumed that morphemic dialectal variations exist in Waray Visayan language between Catarman and Calbayog City speech communities in Samar Island.  This assumption was supported by the theory of language variation by Parker and Riley and the theory of geographic dialect continuum by Chamber and Trudgill.  To prove the assumption, the linguistic analysis method was used wherein five literary pieces written in Waray Visayan language served as sources of verbal data.  These literary pieces were considered as corpora of the study because they deemed to represent the Waray Visayan language being expressions of man’s feelings and thoughts. The findings revealed that the morphemic variations between the two dialects occurred in contextual variation, clipping, and syllable shifts.  With these findings, it was concluded that morphemic dialectal variations exist in Waray Visayan language between Catarman and Calbayog City speech communities in Samar Island.