It will be our own little language

              In the sociolinguistic sense, there are these things called registers. They are the distinguished way of speaking that is accustomed to a particular situation, such as the jargon of law or technological dialect. They do not occur only in formal settings like in the given examples above, they are also prevalent in informal settings, like Jejemon. Although it may go unnoticed, registers are also present in a household setting. There are words and expressions that are particular to some families. They may be made up or a consequence of one member of the family being linguistically influenced by friends and acquaintances. For instance, some family members may be studying in another town that has a different dialect. They may imbibe these dialects themselves and use it in conversations among family members. The rest of the family may end up using the dialect themselves.

             Since I am used to the way my family members speak, it may not be obvious to me that we speak differently. I may not be able to point out if there are special words that we use--I do not think there is at all--but there are slight differences from the way our community speaks from the way others do. I only noticed these differences when I studied in the university in Manila.

             One would be the pronunciation of "baliw." I grew up knowing that the emphasis should be on the first syllable of the word because that is the pronunciation I hear from the people around me. When I said the word to my block mates, they could not understand what I meant. I had to resort to saying it in English. When my block mates from Cavite understood, they said that the emphasis of the word should be on the last syllable.

              Another would be the "eh" at the end of the sentence. It should not be confused with the interjection that Canadians use. "Eh" is used like an inflection at the end and/or beginning of the sentence that gives a person an accent. It is quite similar to the "ah" at the end of the sentence in Batangas Tagalog. For instance, "Eh, hindi naman akin 'yan, eh."

             There is also the word "hane" that I got from studying in another town. It is so distinct to that place's dialect that they even have a festival attributed to the word. The word is used in replacement of the "okay" or "right?" that we put at the end of the sentence. For example, "Tatawagan mo ako, hane?"

             Communication is repetitive. Most of our words, phrases and sentences are something that we heard from someone else. We may have heard it from the television or from snippets of conversation from strangers, but when we are familiarized with a particular way phrasing thoughts, we tend to use what is already tried and tested. This is perhaps why cliches are prevalent. We would rather use secondhand words rather than use new ones that people may not understand immediately.