Bantay-Wika: towards a better understanding of the dynamics of Filipino culture and linguistic change

The Bantay-Wika (Language Watch) project was started in 1994 by the University of the Philippines (UP) Sentro ng Wikang Filipino1 (SWF) in order to track for long periods of time how the Philippine national language is being used and how it develops, particularly in the Philippine media. The first phase of this project, from 1994 to 2004, involved the manual collection and tallying of frequency counts for all the words in eleven major Philippine tablods. With increasing online presence of Philippine news organizations, the project was revived in March 2010, with UP-SWF partnering with UP Digital Signal Processing (DSP) laboratory. The project objectives were also re-drafted to include the development of software that would automate the process of downloading of Filipino news articles. In this paper, we further detail the goals and the history and of the Bantay-Wika project, its accomplishments and plans for future work. The project ultimately endeavors to build a computational model for language development that can guide language policy makers in a multi-lingual country such as the Philippines, in drafting policies that can effectively promote the use and development of their national language.