Identified as ISO 639-3 and has an alternate name Hiligainon, Ilonggo is not native of Mindanao but has a significant number of speakers in Mindanao and Visayas Regions. There is some published information about Ilonggo as the native language of Iloilo but scarce data about its different varieties. This study provides a linguistic description of the grammar of Ilonggo in Mindanao utilizing Basic Linguistic Theory and the functional theory of grammar in accounting for the different features of the language. The language consultants employed by the researcher are native speakers of Ilonggo in Mindanao who willingly translated word and sentence lists and voice recorded them for the accurate details of the sounds of this variety. The analysis shows the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and morphosyntactic features of the language and has revealed salient findings such as the limited fricative sounds, affixation by circumfixes, subjectless sentences, and the co-indexing of the verbal affixes and the case marker in verb initial sentences. This description gives concrete documentation of the current status of the language which leads to more studies aiding queries such as dialectal differences in Ilonggo from Visayas and that of Mindanao variety, language contact (with other dominant languages such as Bisaya) or migration, linguistic typology, and even cross-linguistic analysis. Ultimately, this endeavor is of great significance to students and teachers that teach Ilonggo as their mother tongue as it introduces linguistic concepts which are helpful support to pedagogical strategies and references.

Keywords : Hiligainon, Language Consultant, Linguistic Features, Language Description, Mindanao Philippines.