A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF PHILIPPINE ENGLISH

A brief description of Philippine English Nguyen Thanh Binh
such examples as carnap meaning “steal a car” and Gets? meaning “Understand?”. Compounds
consists of comfort room (toilet, restroom), hold-upper (someone engaged in armed robbery)
and hand carry (carry-on luggage when flying commercial aircraft). The compounds of words
from different languages known as hybrids are also very common such as colegiala English
(college English), balikbayan box (a ubiquitous corrugated box containing any number of small
items and sent by an overseas Filipino known as a “balikbayan”) and buko juice (the juice of a
young coconut).
GRAMMAR
One of the noted grammatical features in Philippine English is the missing of subject-verb
agreement in present tenses as in the sentences “He go to school. His mother give him money to
buy a book.” In some cases, they sometimes use present perfect instead of past simple as in the
sentence Yesterday I have met him and past perfect instead of present perfect or past simple as
in the sentences “Have some pupils tell they class what they had observed” (Pena, 1997, p.92)
and “… Sen. Francis Pangilinan had already started sponsoring the proposed … Act”
(Pankratz, 2004, p.80). Besides, there is also overuse of present continuous tense to refer to
habits and routines as in the sentence He is going to school by bus every morning. Some
transitive verbs are also treated as intransitive verbs as in the sentences I don’t like. I can’t bear.
Do you enjoy? In addition, Filipinos prefer to use auxiliary verbs in present tense to those in
past tense. For example, instead of saying “He said he had finished the test.”, they would prefer
to say “He said he has finished the test.” Determiners are also be used in a very different way.
They usually prefer “the Manuel Quezon University” to “Quezon University” and “the food” to
“food” while they often say “United States” rather than “the United States”. It is concluded that
these features does not match standard British or American English. Also, demonstratives rarely
match with their nouns such as “this pens”. Some non-count nouns are treated as count nouns
as in “You have a beautiful hair!” or “a research”. Kirkpatrick (2007) also looks at one
investigation into distinctive features of Philippine English from Bautista (2005) and mentions
three special features from her research. First, Bautista (2005) discovers that Filipinos favor to
use the structure “one of the SINGULAR NOUN” as in “That’s one of the related problem we
will be discussing”. Second, Filipinos do not also use an article before the word majority as in
“But a survey done by Pulse Asia shows majority of their respondents want President Estrada
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