Traces of hudhud of the Itkak people in Ifugao

ABSTRACT

The well-known epic chant of hudhud, performed in a number of central and southern municipalities of Ifugao province in Northern Luzon, is widely known to be sung in two closely related languages, Tuwali Ifugao and Amganad Ifugao, both belonging to Central Cordilleran languages of the Philippine group. Apart from the Ifugao languages, the province is also inhabited by speakers of three Southern Cordilleran languages: Yattuka, Keley-i and Kalanguya. Hudhud is also sung by the Yattuka and Keley-i, who perform it only in the Yattuka language. There is also some oral evidence of existence of a hudhud soloist from a sub-group of the Kalanguya people – the Itkak – who, reportedly, used to perform hudhud in her native language. This article deals with the available evidence of this most probably extinct hudhud chanted in the Itkak isolect, which has never been documented before and is highly likely to disappear soon. The situation warrants urgent fieldwork to gather further evidence for this oral tradition and document the linguistic variety in which it is reported to have been chanted.

KEYWORDS:

• Ifugao
• hudhud
• epics
• oral tradition
• Philippine Cordillera

Acknowledgements

I thank the following people for their help: Alejandro Mondiging, Alfredo Bumaynin, Appin Gumangan, Gayyon Timmicpao Dulnuan, Janni Bulayungan Albano, Kathleen Maulino, Kerry Faith Guyguyon Bangadon, Maria V. Stanyukovich, Marlon Martin, Ruben Gumangan, Zhenny Aliguyon Baniya. This research was funded by the Fellowship for the Documentation of Oral Literature and Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research (Documentation of Yattuka, a Language of Hudhud, the Epic Chant of Ifugao Province, the Philippines).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The local names of hudhud varieties here are given in the Yattuka language, as my research has been focused primarily on the latter, and also because the Itkak language is much more closely related to it, rather than to Tuwali Ifugao. The hudhud names in literature are normally given in Tuwali, where the counterpart of the Yattuka case marker ni is di, and the counterpart of the word nosi ‘dead’ is nate.

2 Tuwali Ifugao is sometimes referred to as Kiangan Ifugao in literature.

3 ISO 639-3 is the International Organization for Standardization standard for language codes developed by SIL International.

4 Barangay is the smallest administrative unit in the Philippines, in the rural setting it is equal to a village together with surrounding hamlets.

5 The recordings archived in the Philippine Epics and Ballads Archive are accessible at the website: http://epics.ateneo.edu/epics.

6 Liwon used to be a remote sitio of barangay Amduntog and had a status of a special economic zone until it was proclaimed as a barangay in October 2017.

7 Sitio is a typically rural territorial enclave forming a part of a barangay.

8 Unfortunately, I do not have any samples of hudhud in Amganad Ifugao. The Tuwali hudhud recordings can be heard at the website: http://epics.ateneo.edu/epics.

9 Many lexical units are the same in Yattuka, Keley-i and Kalanguya, as mentioned earlier.

10 The list of abbreviations: 3 – third person pronoun; 12 – first and second person pronoun; ACT – actor form of a personal pronoun or case marker; ADJ – adjectival prefix; ADVR – adversative conjunction; DUR – durative; GEN – genitive; IND – independent pronominal form; INTENS – intensive; LK – linker; LV – locative voice; MED – medial; NEUT – neutral aspect; NNOM – non-nominative; NOM – nominative; OBL – oblique; PERS – personal case marker; PFV – perfective; PL – plural; PLN – place name; PN – personal name; PROX – proximal; PV – patient voice; REAL – realization; RF – rhythmic filler; SG – singular; SURP – surprise.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Fellowship for the Documentation of Oral Literature and Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research (Documentation of Yattuka, a Language of Hudhud, the Epic Chant of Ifugao Province, the Philippines).