Editors’ Note: Philippine languages grow out of an archipelagic world shaped by travel, encounters, and everyday life across land and sea. They are more than just ways of speaking—they include writing, gestures, sounds, images, objects, and the ways people use space. In a country with many languages, they carry Austronesian roots, memories of colonization, and today’s global influences, shaping how people communicate, translate, remember, resist, and imagine their future both in the Philippines and in communities abroad and online.
This year’s Philippine Studies Conference in the UK includes topics that look at Philippine languages as tools for communication, sources of power, holders of knowledge, and creative and ethical practices, welcoming work on Austronesian links, colonial and postcolonial histories, English language varieties, translanguaging, language in public spaces, translation, education, migration, cultural production, and the many ways meaning is created and shared.
Bikol literature and language is the topic of a panel of three academics in the Philippine Studies Conference on August 21, 2026 at the SOAS University of London, a public research university.
The overall theme of the conference is “Archipelagic Tongues — Philippine Languages and Meaning-making, Austronesian Worlds and Global Futures,” while the panel on Bikol literature and language is entitled “Istória, Díla’: Archipelagic Recovery and Re-orientation through Bikol.”
The first speaker, Grace M. Saqueton, who has roots in Masbate, will talk about the Pasayaw sa Leon, a folktale that used to be a feature of the Santacruzan in the early 1900s. She will study the dicho, “a form of limerick recited/sung by the paaraway (narrator/main character).” She states that while there are several versions of the tale, there are two prominent ones: Reyna Elena and Prinsipe Constantino battling ferocious creatures while they search for the True Cross, and lowland villagers battling the Agtas who disrupt village festivities. She also states that the dicho is no longer featured in recent versions of the Pasayaw and “attempts to (re)construct the linguistic elements of the tale.” She then traces the “meaning-making practices of the community as they navigate the spaces of remembering, resisting, and living.”
Julie B. Jolo will represent herself and Irish Joy Deocampo in a paper entitled “Tamwa-anay sa Balkonahe: Romero kag Huli, a queer Bikol-Hiligaynon tradaptation of Romeo and Juliet.” They use the Bikol and early Hiligaynon translations of Shakespeare in a short film of the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, “to reframe the act of translating Shakespeare as an experiment of archipelagic and queer co-imagination.” Tradaptation, or translation and adaptation, is “a response to the fidelity toward standard language varieties and heteronormative characterizations found in earlier translations of the play…The project explores how space and language can serve as both manifestation and affective resolution of geo-political conflict and romance.”
Meanwhile, Maria Lorena M. Santos reads the latest novel of Filipina-Australian Merlinda Bobis, In the Name of the Trees, centering on the expression “No Trees, No English.” She looks into how the author unsettles the “ideology of a monolithic English” and “foregrounds archipelagic tongues” through the “sustained integration of Bikol words, phrases, and knowledge traditions… It shows how English and Bikol operate as languages of negotiation in the text, enabling pluriversal, archipelagic modes of meaning-making in representing colonial history, matrilineal memory, and survival.”
All the presenters teach at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City.
The header features an enhanced photo of a bamboo with Baybayin inscription from Mindoro, Philippines, circa 1900-1939. The image is from the conference website. Written by Kabal (a Mangyan author), the script means: 1. My perfume is the lemon bloom; 2. Old age, come not near! 3. It bears fruit for us; 4. If the monsoon had blown; 5. Its petals would have dropped; 6. Strewn over the fields. (credit: Library of Congress). This article was written by Doods M. Santos for Dateline Ibalon.