07 January 2015 - Dr. Rey Agana, a Filipino linguistic scholar, visited the Philippine Embassy in Berlin to convey an advance copy of his new book “Binisaya: Die Verständigungssprache in den Visayan und Mindanaoregionen der Philippinen” (Binisaya: The Language of Communication in the Visayan and Mindanao regions of the Philippines).
According to Dr. Agana, the self-published 200-page book that will become available in January 2015 is his first attempt to provide German speakers with structured lessons on Binisaya grammar and conversational dialogue. Dr. Agana, who formerly taught Tagalog courses at Humboldt University in Berlin, remarked that he was motivated to develop the book because of the strong demand from German spouses, second-generation Filipinos living in Germany as well as German volunteers and development workers undertaking projects in Central and Southern Philippines.
The Embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires Mardonel Celo D. Melicor thanked Dr. Agana for his donation and welcomed his initiative to reach out to German speakers interestedin the Binisaya language. Mr. Melicor noted that there are strong people-to-people linkages owing to the number of German-Filipino families in Germany that have members who originated from these areas. He hopes that Dr. Agana’s book would be utilized by German spouses and German-Filipinos to learn the language systematically and strengthen their bonds with their families in the Philippines.
Mr. Melicor mentioned to Dr. Agana a similar project by a German retiree to offer native German speakers some guide in learning Binisaya. Mr. Heiko Eckard’s “Nagtuon kog Binisaya” (I Am Learning Binisaya), an e-book on its third edition, is available online at https://sites.google.com/site/eckardvisayan/ to persons who wish to make some sense of the lingua franca in Central Visayas and most of Mindanao.
Dr. Agana further observed that Binisaya is experiencing a resurgence in the Philippines, with the proportion of Filipinos who identified themselves as native speakers of Bisaya or Binisaya having doubled to 10 million in 2010 from 5 million in 2000.
Further information on book “Binisaya: Die Verständigungssprache in den Visayan- und Mindanaoregionen der Philippinen” may be found at Dr. Agana’s website: www.agana.de. END