The story of the 2006 Nakem Conference, initially as what it name implies, is that of putting up a centennial conference to honor the plantation workers, many of them Ilokanos, who came to Hawai’i since 1906 to eke out a life here on the premise that life in this land would be a bit better [...]

THE first letter of March 10, 1929 says: “Miss Maria Bumanglag, Ipakpakaunak met ken ka iti disso a napatak, a nanipod pay idi damo a pannakayammo-ammom kaniak ken apaman a ginuyogoymo toy conciensiak a tulongan ka iti tarigagayam, babaen ti panangkitak kadagiti gagayyemko timmauden toy nasam-it a kalikagum a sika koma ti mapagasatan ken mabalangatan [...]

There has been some confusion on Ilokano orthography in the recent years, with proposals to revisit the kind of ‘popularized’ way of writing of the language that started with Bannawag and other printed media, but veritably initiated by creative writers who had access to the means for popular literary expressions, including the drama form, the [...]

The question on where does the term ‘Ilocos’—the basis of my proposed contemporary rendering of ‘Ilokano’ to mean both the people and their language—come from had doggedly resulted in some confusion on the part of the Ilokanos themselves and scholars and cultural researchers.

Revisiting ‘Ilokano’ and its convoluted logics Ask around and you would invariably do not get that subtle divide between what to call a people and what to call his language, as is the case of the Bragado-Saludes position, which, at a certain point especially during the presidency of Bragado at the GUMIL Filipinas, became the [...]

Revisiting ‘Ilokano’ and its convoluted logics CERTAINLY, the exchange from various sectors that are all advocates of the Ilokano language and the kind of culture that it preserves and perpetuate have a legitimate right to ask about what to do with the variants that seem to be standing in the way of self-identification of the [...]

Revisiting ‘Ilokano’ and its convoluted logics But why this long history of resistance and struggle of the Ilokano language against all forms of colonial incursions and against all forms of linguistic and cultural oppression? But why this learned silences from the ranks of all other ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines such as the Bisayans, the [...]

Revisiting ‘Ilokano’ and its convoluted logics (This is a series of essays on the Ilokano language. The series—to number 54—hope to explore, together with the creative writers, the readers, and the Ilokano language and culture teachers, some of the productive ways by which we can explain the structure of the Ilokano language, and the history [...]