Two Sets Statistics of Speakers of Chabacano as Mother Tongue ( 1995 Data )

Local Hispanophones are quick to ridicule it as rag Spanish [español de trapo], castila-castilahan and español del Parián. A historian from Cavite refers to it as the patois of Cavite. But patois—the Cassell’s English dictionary will tell you—means “a dialect spoken by the illiterate people of a district.”[2] Writers and scholars termed the Spanish dialect of Ternate and Cavite City as caló de Cavite, castellano de Cavite or simply caviteño.[3] Dr. José Rizal himself spoke of it as lengua de tienda, language of the marketplace. For the propagandist, Kawit-born Evaristo Aguirre, it was lengua carihán, eatery language. Not without a holier-than-thou demeanor and self-righteous airs, some Filipinos derisively smirk at the creole tongue’s syntactical faults and morphological aberrations. The not so uneducated of them even poke fun at its phonetic flaws. Yet, Norberto Romuáldez (1875-1941), renowned academician and Hispanist, declared decades ago that in our Philippine creole Spanish and “underneath the coarse characteristics of its form, the Filipino soul embraces the Spanish soul, and in the process both are fused together as one.” Philologist Dr. Antonio Quilis fondly calls this autochthonous tongue “cherished Philippine creole Spanish.” Indeed, the Chabacano language is a precious legacy from Spain.

This native tongue is up to this day an active vehicle of communication in the intimacy of Filipino homes in provinces, so geographically far-off from one other, yet firmly bonded by their common Hispanic-Filipino heritage. It bears the popular name of Chabacano/Chavacano. It is basically Spanish in spite of evident alterations in morphology, phonetics, syntax and lexicon.

What follows are two sets statistics of speakers of Chabacano as mother tongue which were taken from various published reports of the National Statistics Office. The first set deals with the number of speakers in Cavite City and Ternate and the second with those of Cavite and Zamboanga del Sur provinces:

In 1990 the total of Filipinos who spoke Chabacano as mother tongue reached only 292,630. The 1990 census did not specify the five variants or dialects. Below are very interesting figures covering the entire archipelago. These statistics were culled from the 1995 national census published in 1997 and certainly they presaged a bright future of Chabacano:

Source : https://filipinokastila.tripod.com/chaba3.html