A Further Ethnography of the Binajau Tambacan Community and Morphology of the Sinama Variety
Keven O. Opamin and Brigette C. Licayan
Abstract
The Sinama languages are spoken in the Sulu Archipelago, Sabah, and Eastern Indonesia, and are known as ‘Bajau’ or ‘Sama-Bajau.’ The Bajau, also known as Sama, are a culturally and linguistically diverse people residing primarily in the southern-central Philippines and eastern regions of Indonesia and Malaysia. As Bajau women are more prone to interaction owing to their domesticated duties, we sought to investigate the morphologies of Binajau-Tambacan, a Sinama variety spoken by the Bajau Women in Barangay Tambacan, Iligan City.
The morphological analysis is divided into two parts: identifying morphemes and investigating morphological processes, ultimately classifying the Sinama dialect of Binajau Tambacan. The data set contains 195 Binajau Tambacan morphemes, including 138 lexical morphemes, 20 grammatical/functional morphemes, and seven bound morphemes. Findings indicate that a variety of morphological processes is emerging in Binajau Tambacan affixations, reduplication, borrowing, and indigenization, indicating that Bajau Women have the highest degree of similarity to Central Sinama, at 82%, classifying the variety as Central Sinama.
Keywords: Sinama, language documentation, linguistic anthropology, Barangay Tambacan