Zamboanga Chabacano (Zamboangueño) is a Spanish-based creole language spoken by around 450,000 people in the Republic of the Philippines in South-East Asia, and by an unknown number of diaspora speakers in Malaysia (Province of Sabah), the United States of America, Canada and elsewhere. Chabacano is the native language of about 50 per cent of the population of the city of Zamboanga and the surrounding area in the extreme western part of the island of Mindanao (approximately 300,000 speakers). A subvariety of Zamboanga Chabacano is also spoken in the town of Cotabato (Mindanao). The creole is also used here as a lingua franca by diverse ethno-linguistic groups. It is codified for public and private purposes with a Hispanic orthography mixed with English and Philippine traditions; there are Bible translations, literary writings, and until recently also press publications. Public oral use has recently been increasing in broadcasting and television, in church, and in some public schools. It lost some of its former significance to Philippine languages (Tagalog and Cebuano) and English.
The default lect that we chose for description in APiCS is roughly the speech of 20-40 year old people living in city of Zamboanga. Nearly all constructed examples are from different native speakers instructed for fieldwork on Chabacano at the Ateneo of Zamboanga. Examples which come from other lects/sources are indicated in the dataset: own fieldwork data (spontaneous speech) or sources from other authors (especially from Forman 1972). If these lects do not deviate from our default lect, examples from these sources are also cited under default lect. There are nearly no examples from the written lect which is partly very hispanicized (e.g. in the Bible translation).