Philippine ESL Journal Vol. 19, July 2017 ©2015 ELE Publishing ISSN 1718-2298 Page 84 Chinese Filipinos tag their questions, kiam si? Some notes on tag questions in Philippine Hybrid Hokkien Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales National University of Singapore, Singapore Abstract This paper investigates tag questions in a Philippine contact variety spoken by Chinese in the Philippines called Philippine Hybrid Hokkien (PHH) – a trilingual admixture that is characterized by the systematic co-existence of the Hokkien, Tagalog, and English grammatical (sub)systems. After analyzing spontaneous oral data gathered from native speakers, ten types of tag questions were identified, with two of them being bilingually innovative and unique to PHH (e.g. m si ba?). Further analyses of data reveal that attitudinal tag questions are more frequently used than confirmatory tag questions. That alternative tags (e.g. okay?) are more preferred compared to their canonical counterparts have also been suggested by initial data. Although the use of tag questions in PHH is reminiscent of the individual grammars of English, Tagalog, and Hokkien, data suggests that PHH, whether analyzed as a trilingual linguistic variety or a hybrid X-English, is developing away from these normative languages and that the Chinese Filipinos are creating new norms for this variety. Keywords: Chinese Filipinos; Philippine English; Philippine Hybrid Hokkien; mixed languages; tag questions Preliminaries In the Chinese enclaves of the Philippines, particularly in the Binondo and Quezon City, a peculiar oral linguistic phenomenon can be observed to be spoken by the Chinese Filipinos (i.e. Filipino-Chinese, Chinoys, etc.) residing there. What appears to be an entirely different _____________________ Corresponding Author: Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales Affiliation: National University of Singapore, Singapore Email:wdwgonzales@gmail.com/wdwgonzales@u.nus.edu