It is a part of the Bisayan language family and is closely related to Waray and Hiligaynon.
There are three dialects of Bantayanon, based in the three municipalities that comprise the island group: Binantayanun (in Bantayan), Linawisanun (in Madridejos), and Sinantapihanun (in Santa Fe), the most idiosyncratic of the three.
The first mention of the language spoken on the Bantayan islands seems to be from the Spanish historian and Jesuit missionary Ignacio Alcina, who wrote in 1668,"Finally, it could have happened that people from various larger or smaller islands passed over to the others, as is an established fact among them.
[3] The only published scholarship on the Bantayanon language is a Master of Arts thesis presented to Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT) by Minda Carabio-Sexon,[4] in which she looks at the lexical relationship between Bantayanon and its neighboring languages, presents findings from mutual-intelligibility tests with related languages, and provides a sociolinguistic profile of the island's inhabitants.
a documentation project of Bantayanon underway by researcher Jarrette K. Allen, a PhD candidate at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA.