Language Change In The Philippines

It is very well agreed upon that language is ever-changing. It is either given a chance to evolve, or it stagnates and it dies. There are many circumstances that contribute to the growth – the evolution of a language. Sometimes, language not only changes, but diverges and becomes something very different from its original. This divergence is influenced by time as it is passed from culture to culture, and generation to generation. However, language change does not look much from the perspective of one lifetime. A child and a parent will understand each other, but across multiple generations – hundreds or thousands of years of ancestry – language will change to the point of difficulty in understanding between speaker and listener (Burton, Dechaine, Vetikiotis-Bateson, 2012).
Language in the Philippines is no exception. In recent times, divergences in the spoken languages, be it English or Filipino, have given life to distinct and different ways of language communication. Unlike most evolving language, it did not take hundreds of years to distinguish its uniqueness. These sociolects are the Bekimon, Konyo-speak, and Jejemon.
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect, or social dialect, is a veriety of language associated with a social group. These groups could possibly include a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, and many more. The term

It is a sociolect that started out as an argot, or a secret language, which became the general slang of the homosexual community in the Philippines. It uses elements from Tagalog, English, Spanish, and even from Japanese. It also uses celebrities’ names and trademark brands, giving them new meanings in different context. Gay people who speak the language are humorously called the Bekimons, though in recent times, the sociolect has not been exclusively spoken by the gay community. Some heterosexual women who mostly associate with gay men also spoke the