Over the past two decades, there has been a cultural revival of sorts in Davao City, especially responsiveness in names that titillate the Filipino psyche. This kind of consciousness may aptly be called as ‘linguistic awareness’ because the central aspect of the trend is focused on the use of local terms to propagate products.
The internet defines language awareness as an “explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching and language use [and] covers a wide spectrum of fields.”
The local terms, mostly from major languages and dialects around the archipelago, have eventually become business trademarks, brand names, and so on. But more significantly, they mirror the true character of a Filipino conversation about things he loves or cares.
Historically, the adaptation of vernacular words as product identities entered the realm of business in Davao City quite late. In the past quarter of a century, after the surge of so-called ‘Japayuki terms,’ mostly names of beerhouses and dining clubs owned by Filipinos who went to Japan, tolerance towards casual dialectical terminologies started to open up.
In recent years, food houses such as Karahay (cauldron), Yahong (soup bowl), Kaldero (kettle), Tagbuan (rendezvous), Taboan (flea market), Kambingan (goat-meat restaurant), Luz Kinilaw Place (a place to eat ceviche), Sana’s Kabawan (restaurant serving carabao meat), and Kan-anan (literally, ‘eating place’) have become recognizable nomenclatures.
In recent years, new additions made it to this interesting list. Names like Puto Maya at Tsokolate (snack cum dining stall), Rekado (slang for ‘ingredient’), Kaonanan Sa Tribu K’Mindanawan (tribal food house), Saging Repablik (literary, ‘banana republic’), and Balik Bukid (an organic food eatery) have entered the gourmet’s non-traditional lexicon.
And when it comes to haberdashery and clothing stores, you will encounter Biste, Damit, Sinina, and Pantalon, as some of the iconic local trademarks. Except for the last term, which means ‘pants,’ the three other store names tell the customer the establishments are specifically into tailoring and fitting clothes. And there’s Patahian, which simply means tailorshop, and Mananahi sa Davao (sewer).
An earlier but amusingly version of ‘linguistic awareness’ transpired in the late 1980s, courtesy of a store that carried the street name Yagbulls (from bayag or ox testicles), situated along Ponciano Reyes Street, just across a now bustling elementary school. The eatery did not strictly adopt local terms, but employed slang words to attract customers drawn to exotic food.
If memory serves us right, its frog cuisine was known as Fried Kokak and its snake menu was Zuma, the man-snake popularized in comic strips and movies. (Coincidentally, the Zuma role in Filipino films was first played by actor Max Laurel, a former resident of Toril District.)
With the entry of the nineties, odd sounding business names started to show up in records. For instance, along Florentino Torres street, not too far from the Mabini junction, there was Puslan Man (a Visayan expression of dejection), a pub that offered poetry reading and storytelling.
With a thin crowd visiting the place nightly, it was later forced to transfer to a smaller stall a few meters from Davao Doctors Hospital. Predictably, with a very low turnout of customers that ensued, it eventually closed shop.
In the martial law era, three names stood out as recognizable among Davao residents. Long before the Mang Inasal craze took the country by storm, Tambuli (shell bugle), the first and most popular grilled chicken house in Davao, was a real draw; it was housed in a three-story sawali-walled structure along San Pedro Street, in a place where a budget hotel now stands.
The Harana (customary form of courtship) and Sarungbanggi (‘one night,’ in Bicol) restaurants at Matina were also early competitors but were later moved to its permanent home at F. Street, considered as the city’s food district until it was wracked with nightly violence perpetrated by drunken customers from nearby pubs.
New entrepreneurs, interestingly, find the use of vernacular terms as fashionable, stylistic, and trendsetting. This is a faint reminder of old dining corners that carried familiar names like tambayan (hangout), piyesta (feast), kainan (eatery), sinugba (grilled) habhab (eat greedily), lambat (fish net) and sumsuman or pulutan (fingerfoods).
As early as the seventies, the most popular short-order food for Cebuanos was sutukil, short for sugba (grill), tula (stew), and kinilaw (raw meat cooked in vinegar, spices, and herbs).
Some sociologists describe this preference for local terms in businesses as a ‘cultural trend,’ something that has to do with the way people appreciate native or tribal nuances, or a new kind of revival that puts credit and merit on the lure that vernacular terms afford.
To some, though, it’s a kind of discovery that attracts people who have been eternally exposed to names associated with European, Roman or American. After all, there is more to local terminologies than meet the eyes, especially when they translate into sumptuous meals or scrumptious foods.
