Missing Something

Watching The Sweet Life of Lucy and reading her column in Philippine Star make me realize how much I miss my growing up years in Negros. Lucy is disarmingly probinsiyana and makes no bones to hide it in either medium. In The Sweet Life, she constantly says words in the dialect and Wilma reacts and mimics her, eliciting a chuckle from Lucy in the process. Listening to Lucy makes me realize how so many words in Ilonggo are similar to those in her dialect. I believe she's from Ormoc.

Years back, we were in Wendy's and they were offering this salad buffet. I think I may have recounted this in a previous post but I'm repeating it here. In the next table to ours, someone commented upon seeing the mountainful of salad atop a companion's place, "daw sungak-sungak ka ba." I hadn't heard the expression in years and it so amused me. Yesterday, a victim of Typhoon Frank said "ang mga pamuluyo" and while I knew what that meant, I couldn't translate it for my Tagalog husband.

Having lived more than half of my life in Manila has caused me to lose touch with many words in the Ilonggo dialect, especially "deep" words which I never ever encountered to begin with. Hearing Ilonggo spoken by strangers always draws a smile from me, a nudge to my husband in the mall or my son, after which I say, "Ilonggo, or nose-nose" just so I won't be too obvious.

That I haven't lost my Ilonggo accent though it's been 34 years since I've lived in Manila is perhaps a testimony to how much I love the province where I came from.

Funny that this post was provoked by a comment to my previous blog about my ninang dress, an expletive which only an ILonggo can utter without thought, without provocation. Just part of the system, not mine, never mine. So I deleted the aberration.