Ivatan

Ivatan is the language of the Batanes Islands, the northernmost province of the Philippines, spoken by ~33,000 people on Batan, Sabtang and the surrounding islets. It belongs to the Batanic (Bashiic) branch, whose closest member is not a Philippine language at all: Yami (Tao) on Orchid Island, Taiwan. The branch straddles the Bashi Channel, so the family boundary here runs across a national one. Ivatan has two dialects — Ivasayen around Basco and Isamurongen in the southern towns, where Basco's timoy 'rain' is chimoy. It keeps a central vowel /ɨ/, written ⟨e⟩ as in the northern Philippines generally, and is one of the few Philippine languages without [ɾ]-[d] alternation. Written form is unsettled: the Wikipedia article on the language says outright that there is no consistent way of writing it, and three spellings circulate — the DepEd Ortograpiya Ivatan (2015) with ⟨ch ñ ng⟩, a Spanish-influenced popular spelling with ⟨j⟩ and ⟨c⟩, and the linguists' practical orthography. This row uses the last, from Tsuchida, Yamada & Moriguchi (1987), because it covers Ivatan and Itbayaten in one system and every cell can be checked against Reid (1971).

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