Core Ilocano Vocabulary: What the Swadesh List Shows

A Swadesh list is a fixed set of basic concepts that every language has a word for — eye, water, eat, big, two, mother. The linguist Morris Swadesh assembled it in the 1950s on a simple principle: choose concepts so fundamental that every culture needs them and no culture borrows them from a neighbour.

That last part is what makes the list useful here. Ordinary vocabulary travels between languages easily — Ilocano and Tagalog share a great deal of Spanish and English, and share words with each other through contact. Core vocabulary resists that. So if two languages agree on their basic words, it is usually because they inherited them from a common ancestor rather than because one picked them up from the other.

Which turns “how close are Ilocano and Tagalog?” from an opinion into something countable.

Of the 135 core concepts in our set, Ilocano and Tagalog use the identical word for 16 — about 12%. On the vocabulary least likely to be borrowed, they agree roughly one time in eight.

This is the evidence behind a claim made elsewhere on this site: that Tagalog speakers cannot follow Ilocano. Both languages are Austronesian and both are Philippine, so the grammar rhymes — but a shared family tree is not the same as a shared vocabulary, and the basic words are where that becomes obvious.

The 119 concepts where the words differ are not exotic terms. They are ear, nose, mouth, hand, foot.

The pattern in that table is the interesting part. Nouns for things that sit inside a family hold up best — 3 of 6 family terms are identical. Verbs and adjectives collapse: 1 of 35 everyday verbs match, and of the 26 words for describing things, not one is the same in both.

So a Tagalog speaker might recognise what an Ilocano sentence is about and still have no idea what is being said about it. That is a fair description of what partial comprehension between these two languages actually feels like.

Several of these go far wider than the two languages. Mata for eye and aso for dog turn up across most Philippine languages, and beyond them into the wider Austronesian family — they are inherited, not exchanged. If you want to see how far that reach goes, aso across all nine languages shows it directly.

A word appearing in both languages is not proof it means the same thing. These three are worth knowing before you rely on a resemblance.

• Tulangbone — Tagalog buto

  A trap: Tagalog tulang means 'poem'. The Tagalog for bone is buto.

• Aldawsun — Tagalog araw

  Ilocano aldaw and Tagalog araw both mean sun and day. Context decides.

• Bulanmoon — Tagalog buwan

  In both languages the word for moon is also the word for month.

The wider set of these has a guide of its own.

A Swadesh list is not a frequency list. It is not the 135 words Ilocano speakers say most often — it is the set linguists use to compare languages against each other. Some items on it are rare in daily speech, and plenty of genuinely common words are missing: thank you, tomorrow, money, every greeting.

We keep the distinction because the two answer different questions. If you want the words you will actually use first, the phrasebook is built for that. If you want to know how the languages relate, this list is the better instrument.

• Browse the same vocabulary by topic in the Ilocano word lists.
• See the grammar these words sit inside in Ilocano vs Tagalog.
• For the family-tree context, how Philippine languages are related.