Cebuano is spoken natively by the inhabitants of Cebu, Bohol, Negros Oriental and the people in western Leyte province and northern Mindanao. The language is the second-most spoken language in the Philippines after Tagalog. The dialect used in Bohol is called Boholano and is sometimes considered a separate language.
Cebuano is a language with Verb Subject Object sentence order. It uses prepositions rather than postpositions. Nouns come after adjectives, but before genitives or relative phrases.
Cebuano has sixteen consonants: p, t, k, ? (the glottal stop), b, d, g, m, n, ng, s, h, w, l, r and y. There are three vowels: i, a, and u/o. The vowels u and o are allophones, with u always being used when it is the beginning of a syllable, and o always used when it ends a syllable. Accent is also a distinguisher of words, so that dápit means "to invite", while dapít means "place".
Nouns in Cebuano are inflected for person, number, and case, with inclusive and exclusive "we" distinguished. The four cases are nominative, preposed genitive, postposed genitive, and oblique.
Cebuano has long borrowed words from Spanish, such as krus (cross) and brilyante (brilliant). It has several hundreds of loan words from English as well, which are altered to conform to the limited phonemic inventory of Cebuano: brislit (bracelet), hayskul (high school), syapin (shopping), dikstrus (dextrose), sipir (zipper), bigsyat (big shot), or prayd tsikin (fried chicken).
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Cebuano words and phrases
Numbers
Common expressions
Related articles
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