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[wiganer]

It is said that the Spanish language has more or less disappeared from the Philippines but Chavacano has 2 million speakers and I would say it has more similarities to Spanish than the French spoken in Haiti does with the French spoken in metropolitan France.

Should Chavacano be reclassified as Spanish?

[Gringo Greg]

There are two groups of Chavacano speakers, Cavite and Zamboanga. The Zamboangueno Chavacano has the largest number of speakers, but like Cavite, it is dying out. The language is becoming more heavily infused with more and more Tagalog and Visayan because of intermarriage

My wife speaks Zamboangueno Chavacano as her first language so that is my background. Chavacano is more classified as a Creole Spanish than anything else. It's got the grammatical structure of Visayan and Tagalog but a Spanish vocabulary.

With elderly Chavacano speakers, it's possible for a Spanish speaker to completely understand what is being said and with limited grammar changes make himself completely understood. Unfortunately with the younger generation, that is not really possible since they infuse much more Visayan/Tagalog vocabulary into their speach.