JOURNEY IN HERITAGE LANGUAGE PRESERVATION-VOICES OF THE KAGAN SPEAKERS

Abstract

The emergence and embracement of immigrant languages threaten indigenous languages to be neglected resulting to become extinct. This qualitative study aimed to gather the oral literature and analyze the morphosemantic features of the Kagan language in Hagonoy, Davao del Sur to help preserve the language and the culture of the tribe which has gradually vanished because of assimilation with people of different culture and language. Kagan elders whose ages ranging from 46 to 92 years old were the informants, with nine assigned for the FGD and 14 for the IDI. Results revealed that Kagan’s preserved oral literature consists of prayer, lyric poetry, and poem. It also divulged that Kagan language is rich of distinct characteristics in terms of its morphology and semantics. The retrieved oral literatures’ morphological features include affixes, verb tenses, pronouns, descriptive adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions. The semantic features are the deictic expressions, denotative words, connotative words, symbols, synonymy, antonymy, and dialectal words. Further, results of the study would provide essential information on the morphosemantic features which convey the existence of an ethnolinguistic group that bears its distinct cultural heritage.