How to Get Away with Saying Too Much: “Charot!” as a Deflective Linguistic Armor in Everyday Filipino Talk

Abstract

This study investigates the swardspeak term “charot”—along with its wide morphological family—to show how a seemingly playful queer lexeme has become a highly productive discourse device in contemporary Filipino communication. Drawing on a 700-token anonymized social media corpus and employing semantic, morphological, dependency-syntactic, and pragmatic analyses, it traces the word’s queer genealogy, its semantic narrowing from earlier lexicographic meanings, and its integration into Tagalog morphosyntax. Findings reveal that “charot” consistently appears in sentence-final, paratactic positions; it functions less as propositional content and more as a metapragmatic operator that retroactively reframes an utterance as humorous, unserious, or affectively buffered. Beyond signaling “just joking,” “charot” performs culturally specific labor: managing face-threats and emotional risk, softening disclosures of vulnerability, and tempering critique within norms of “hiya,” “pakikisama,” and indirectness—all while allowing Filipinos to say too much, too boldly, or too tenderly.