Excerpt

In the catalog of Philippine languages nobody has as yet ventured to include the speech of a certain community the ancestors of which, originally dwellers in a far distant region, came to settle in the Philippines under peculiar circumstances of which history has preserved a fairly accurate record.

Whatever may have caused the disregard of this dialect, be it the insignificant number of the speakers, the gradual disappearance of the dialect itself, or the lack of a sufficiently interested recorder willing to spend his time on the task of its exploration, it seemed a proper undertaking for a member of the class in Philippine linguistics to make a record of whatever could be ascertained as to the present and, if possible, the former status of the dialect in question which is none other than the so-called “Ternate-dialect”.

The Ternate dialect is spoken in the town of Ternate, a locality in the province of Cavite more often alluded to in the surrounding region as “Barra”, a Spanish term denoting a bank at the mouth of a river. Also the word “Wawa”, which is a Tagalog name for the mouth of a river on the sea-coast, is sometimes heard applied to the place. Ternate was formerly a barrio, — a more or less detached subdivision of a pueblo or town in the Philippines — of the larger town of Maragondon, and is situated on the northeastern bank of the Maragondon River, near its debouchure on the coast of Cavite Province.