1 Kapampangan Lexical Borrowing from Tagalog: Endangerment rather than Enrichment Michael Raymon M. Pangilinan siuala@yahoo.co.uk Abstract It has sometimes been argued that the Kapampangan language will not be endangered by lexical borrowings from other languages and that lexical borrowings help enrich a language rather than endanger it. This paper aims to prove otherwise. Rather than being enriched, the socio-politically dominant Tagalog language has been replacing many indigenous words in the Kapampangan language in everyday communication. A number of everyday words that have been in use 20 years ago ~ bígâ (clouds), sangkan (reason), bungsul (to faint) and talágâ (artesian well) just to name a few ~ have all been replaced by Tagalog loan words and are no longer understood by most young people. This paper would present a list of all the words that have been replaced by Tagalog, and push the issue that lexical borrowing from a dominant language leads to endangerment rather than enrichment. I. Introduction At first glance, the Kapampangan language does not seem to be endangered. It is one of the eight major languages of the Philippines with approximately 2 million speakers (National Census and Statistics Office, 2003). It is spoken by the majority in the province of Pampanga, the southern half of the province of Tarlac, the northeast quarter of the province of Bataan, and the bordering communities of the provinces of Bulacan and Nueva Ecija (Fig. 1). It has an established literature, with its grammar being studied as early as 1580 by the Spanish colonisers (Manlapaz, 1981). It has also recently penetrated the electronic media: the first ever province-wide news in the Kapampangan language was televised in 2007 by the Pampanga branch of the Manila-based ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation. It has also a number of advocates campaigning on the internet at the Yahoo Group forum Academia ning Amanung Sisuan International (ANASI). Despite its large population, its well-developed literature and its adaptation to electronic media, the Kapampangan language exhibits certain anomalies that can only be interpreted as symptoms of endangerment. Kapampangan speakers, with the exception of an elite few, are now mostly illiterate in their own language, it being not taught in schools. It is also not being used as the medium of instruction and its use is actually being proscribed in the classroom, whereby students pay a fine every time they speak it. It has been observed that with the proliferation of the public pre-school education program known as the Day Care Centers since the 1990s, Kapampangan parents began talking to their children in the dominant Philippine language, Tagalog, rather than in their mother tongue. The Kapampangan language therefore is already showing signs of being moribund since the younger generation are no longer being taught to speak it. As for the population that continue to speak it, their version of Kapampangan evidently shows signs of lexical attrition whereby a number of the significant indigenous vocabulary is slowly being replaced by words borrowed from the dominant language, Tagalog.