ABSTRACT
My initial encounter with Philippine English (PhE) came in the early 1980s, when I first started to visit the Philippines as the guest of a Filipino-American family living in the Paranaque, a city south of Manila, quite close to Roxas Boulevard. As my hosts explained, the patriarch of the family had arrived with the US forces in 1898, and had stayed on as a businessman in the US colonial period, and had fathered seven children with his wife who was an Ilocano, a major ethnolinguistic of northern Philippines. During the Japanese occupation of the country during World War Two, he was imprisoned and died in the notorious internment camp in the grounds of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. One of his children had sons who had served as a medical officer during the Vietnam War, and, on several occasions, he kindly invited me to stay at his house in a fishing barrio in Ilocos Sur, a province near the northern tip of the Philippines. At that time, I was a rather young and very inexperienced lecturer at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), but during those early visits in the 1980s, I had little contact with the Philippine academia, but was very moved by the hospitality and kindness of the Filipino people.
