Ilokano Translation Services

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Translation Services USA offers professional translation services for English to Ilokano and Ilokano to English language pairs. We also translate Ilokano to and from any other world language. We can translate into over 100 different languages. In fact, Translation Services USA is the only agency in the market which can fully translate Ilokano to literally any language in the world!

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Ilokano Language Facts:

• 9.1 million native speakers
• Spoken by 0.14% of the world population
• Mainly spoken in Philippines (Luzon)

Ilocano, also Iloko and Ilokano, refers to the language and culture associated with the Ilocano people, the third largest ethnic group in the Philippines. The native area of the Ilocano are in northwestern Luzon and is the defining identity for the Ilocos Region.

People and History

Ilocanos are of Malay stock, descendants of Southeast Asian migrants that settled the Philippines in successive waves for centuries. The term Ilocano come from i-, meaning "from", and lo-oc, meaning "cove or bay", thus "people of the bay." Ilocanos also refer to themselves as Samtoy, a contraction from the Ilocano phrase saö mi ditoy, meaning "our language here".

Ilocanos occupy the narrow, barren strip of land in the northwestern tip of Luzon, squeezed in between an inhospitable mountain range to the east and the open sea to the west. This geographic coincidence molded a people known for their clannishness, tenacious industry and frugality, traits that were vital to survival. It also induced Ilocanos to become a migratory people, always in search for better opportunities and for land to build a life on. Although their homeland constitutes the provinces of Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur and parts of La Union and Abra, their population has spread east and south of their original territorial borders. Ilocano pioneers flocked to the more fertile Cagayan Valley and the Pangasinan plains during the 18th and 19th centuries and now constitute a majority in many of these areas. In the 20th century, many Ilocano families moved further south to Mindanao, and they became the first Filipino ethnic group to immigrate en masse to North America, forming sizable communities in the American states of Hawaii, California, Washington and Alaska. A large, growing number of Ilocanos can also be found in the Middle East, Hong Kong, Japan and the urban centers of Canada and Europe.

Culture

Literature and the Arts

Pre-colonial Ilocanos employed a syllabic writing system that was widely used in the population prior to European arrival. Similar to the Tagalog and Pangasinan scripts, it was the first to designate coda consonants with a diacritic mark. The Ilocano script was innovated with a cross verama to designate coda consonants. The Ilocano Doctrina Cristiana of 1621, one of the earliest surviving publications, display this device.

Language

Ilocano or Iloko (ISO 639 ilo) is a Western Austronesian language spoken in Northern Luzon and in various parts of the country and around the world. It comprises its own branch in the Philippine Cordilleran family of languages and is the lingua franca of the northern region. It is spoken by about nine million people.

Ilocano has two dialects: Northern "deeper" Ilocano and Southern Ilocano. The difference between these two dialects are merely regional variations in lexicon and intonation. The southern speech, in addition, uses six vowels instead of the usual a, e, i, o, u sounds that the northern dialect employs (using Spanish orthography). Southern Ilocanos (e.g. those from La Union and Pangasinan) has two distinct sounds for the vowel e, a frontal easy "e" like in "men" for many words in Spanish and English, and an unrounded "uh" sound for native words.

For example, the word for "yes" is wen. Northern speech would pronounce it as wen which rhymes with "men" while Southern speech would pronounce it as wuhn.

Ilocano employs a predicate-initial structure and uses a highly complex list of affixes (prefixes, suffixes, infixes and enclitics) and reduplications to indicate a wide array of grammatical categories. Learning simple root words and corresponding affixes goes a long way in forming cohesive sentences. Ilocano also has five sets of pronouns.

Example: Root word for bath is digos.