IN the last few weeks, we have been talking about variation, how Philippine English varies from American English and other varieties of the language. However, we have only talked about how Philippine English differs from other varieties in contemporary times. Fortuitously, in 2011, when I was still an assistant professor at De La Salle University, I built a database on Philippine English of the 1960s. There exists the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English — or the Brown Corpus — which was created in the 1960s, and I compiled parallel Philippine data for this American data. There are also 1990s data for both varieties, as well as British English (both 1960s and 1990s). With these available data, it is therefore possible to track changes in Philippine English from the 1960s to the 1990s and compare these with what is happening in American English and British English. In doing so, I had the privilege of working with esteemed Australian linguist Peter Collins, an honorary professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

In making such comparisons, not only are we simply describing change in Philippine English, but we are also able to answer important questions regarding it and other varieties as well, such as: