Tboli language

Tboli, also Tau Bilil, Tau Bulul or Tagabilil, is an Austronesian language spoken in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, mainly in the province of South Cotabato but also in the neighboring provinces of Sultan Kudarat and Sarangani. According to the Philippine Census from 2000, close to 100,000 Filipinos identified T'boli or Tagabili as their native language.

Classification
Tboli is classified as a member of the South Mindanao or Bilic branch of the Philippine language families. The closest language to it is Blaan. Both are also related to Bagobo, and Tiruray.

Geographic distribution
Tboli is spoken in the following areas (Ethnologue).


 * South Cotabato Province: Mount Busa area and west
 * Sarangani Province: Celebes seacoast, Katabau west to provincial border
 * Sultan Kudarat Province: Kraun area and Bagumbayan municipality

Dialects are Central Tboli, Western Tboli, and Southern Tboli (Ethnologue).

Phonemic inventory
list seven vowel phonemes, namely and 15 consonant phonemes shown in the chart below. Note that Tboli lacks as a phoneme and has  instead, which is a typological rarity among Philippine languages.

Stress
Final stress is the norm in Tboli rootwords; however, the stress shifts to the previous syllable if the final vowel is a schwa.

Phonotactics
Unlike most other Philippine languages and Austronesian languages in general, Tboli permits a variety of consonant clusters at the onset of a syllable. This is evident in the name of the language,, but also in other words like 'dust', , 'one month,'  'starry,'  'temporarily,'  'before,' and others.

observe impressionistically there is a very short schwa pronounced in between the consonant cluster. However, these consonant clusters have not yet been analyzed acoustically.

Nouns
Unlike other Philippine languages, Tboli does not make use of case-marking articles.

Plurality is marked by the article kem preceding the noun; kudà 'horse' (sg.), kem kudà 'horses.'

Pronouns
Tboli pronouns indicate person, number, clusivity, and grammatical role. group Tboli pronouns into two main categories based on what they term "focus," which appear to be related to the absolutive-ergative case system in other Philippine languages. There are two further subcategories for each which deal with whether the singular pronouns behave as enclitics or as independent words. Their use depends on their role and position in a sentence.

Examples using the third person plural pronoun.


 * Mken le. 'They eat.' (focused, dependent pronoun).
 * Lu mken. 'They are the ones who ate.' (focused, independent pronoun)
 * Balay le. 'Their house.' (nonfocused, dependent pronoun).
 * Dwata semgyok kul. 'May God take care of them.' (nonfocused, independent pronoun).

Syntax
Word order in Tboli is usually verb-subject-object, though there is some variation.

Mulu  le   sfu   soging.

planted they shoot banana

"They planted banana shoots."

Verbs
Tboli, like other Philippine languages, makes a distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs. Intransitive verbs are marked with the affix me- while transitive verbs are marked with ne-. Unlike Philippine languages, applicative affixes are not used in Tboli though prepositions are used instead.

Furthermore, aspect marking is not marked on the verb but with preverbal aspect markers such as deng (completed actions) and angat (incomplete action).

Morphology
Tboli makes use of prefixes and infixes. claim that suffixes do not exist in the language, though proclitic affixes may be thought of as such.

Writing system
Tboli has no official writing system, though the Latin script is usually used to write the language. The orthography is more or less similar to the one employed by Tagalog: b, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, ng (for ), s, t, w, and y (for ), though other letters may be used in writing foreign words.

use a system of diacritics to accommodate the seven vowel phonemes of Tboli. The vowels are: a, i, é (for ), e (for ), ó (for ), u, and o (for ).

The glottal stop is usually not represented in writing. Though the grave accent ` is used to represent it as in ngà 'child' and gawì  'serving spoon.' If a vowel already has a diacritic on it, then the circumflex accent ^ is used as in sdô  and bê  'don't.'

Awed et al. note that sometimes that the apostrophe may be used to break up an initial consonant cluster as in the name of the language; that is, T'boli instead of simply Tboli. They note that native Tboli speakers have had "a very strong negative reaction" to this convention, preferring instead to write Tboli.