Rethinking (from) the Islands

This paper calls for rethinking not only studies in the Philippines but also, from them, the premises of variationist sociolinguistics. Through a grounded-theoretic thematic analysis of 77 sociolinguistic studies, it identifies seven patterns shaped by postcolonialism. Key findings show that degree of language contact does not automatically determine the social salience of differences and that most studies depart from “canonical” methodologies, prioritizing multilingualism and (post-) colonial histories/ideologies over “variable-rule” analyses. These findings motivate a dual framing: rethinking variation in the islands, which revisits Philippine sociolinguistic research as a collective, relational body of work that transcends disciplinary boundaries; and rethinking variation from the islands, which uses these insights to refine variationist theory to better account for postcolonial ecologies. While latter-wave variationism advances post-structural insights (e.g., emic perspectives, indexicality), Philippine sociolinguistics extends these by embedding them in multilingual, postcolonial contexts, advancing alternative epistemologies that position these settings as generative sites for theorizing variation itself.

本文主張不僅應重新審視菲律賓本土之語言研究，更須由此出發，對變異社會語言學的基本理論預設進行反思。透過對77項社會語言學研究進行紮根理論之主題分析，本研究識別出七種受後殖民主義影響形成的模式。關鍵發現顯示：語言接觸程度並不能自動決定差異的社會顯著性；且多數研究偏離「典範式」研究方法，轉而將多語現象及（後）殖民歷史／意識形態置於「變異規則」分析之上。這些發現促成本文提出雙重框架：「島內變異再思」將菲律賓社會語言學研究視為超越學科疆界的集體性、關係性知識體系；「島外理論重構」則運用上述成果精煉變異主義理論，使其更能解釋後殖民語言生態。儘管第三波變異主義已推進後結構主義視角（如主位性、指標性），菲律賓社會語言學通過將這些概念嵌入多語後殖民情境，進一步發展出另類認識論，從而將此類場域定位為變異理論本身生成的沃土。