****Aklanon (Akeanon), also known as Bisaya/Binisaya nga ****Aklanon/Inaklanon or simply Aklan, is an Austronesian language of the Bisayan subgroup spoken by the ****Aklanon people in the province of Aklan on the island of Panay in the Philippines. Its unique feature among other Bisayan languages is the close-mid back unrounded vowel occurring as part of diphthongs and traditionally written with the letter ⟨Ee⟩ such as in the autonyms Akean and Akeanon. However, this phoneme is also present in other but geographically scattered and distant Philippine languages, namely Itbayat, Isneg, Manobo, Samal and Sagada. The Malaynon dialect is 93% lexically similar to Aklanon and has retained the "l" sounds, which elsewhere are often pronounced as "r".

Phonology

Aklanon has 21 phonemes. There are 17 consonants: p, t, k, b, d, g, m, n, ng, s, h, l, r, w, y, the glottal stop, and the voiced velar fricative. There are six vowels: the three native vowels i, a, and u, which are typical for a Bisayan vowel inventory, the additional e and o for loanwords and common nouns, and a distinct phoneme argued by Zorc (2005) to be a close-mid back unrounded vowel.

Vowels

Consonants

from loanwords can also be heard as palatal stops. can also be heard as and can also alternate with.

Common phrases

Philippine national proverb

Here is the Philippine national proverb in various languages.

Numbers

Literature

Note: All these poems were written by Melchor F. Cichon, an Aklanon poet.

Learning resources