The variety spoken in Zamboanga City, located in the southern Philippine island group of Mindanao, has the highest concentration of speakers.

While a majority of the lexicon of the different Chavacano varieties derive from Spanish, their grammatical structures are generally similar to other Philippine languages.

The word Chabacano is derived from Spanish, roughly meaning "poor taste" or "vulgar", though the term itself carries no negative connotations to contemporary speakers.

When Caviteño officers recruited workers and technicians from Iloilo to man their sugar plantations and rice fields to reduce the local population's dependence on the Donativo de Zamboanga, the Spanish colonial government levied taxes on the islanders to support the fort's operations.

With the subsequent migration of Ilonggo traders to Zamboanga, the Zamboangueño Chavacano was infused with Hiligaynon words as the previous migrant community was assimilated.

[11] In contrast with the Luzon-based dialects, the Zamboangueño variety has the most borrowings and/or influence from other Philippine Austronesian languages including Hiligaynon and Tagalog.

Words of Malay origin are present in the Zamboangueño variety; the latter is included because although not local in Philippines, it was the lingua franca of maritime Southeast Asia and is still spoken in Muslim areas of Mindanao.

[15] The earliest believed attestation of a coherent creole language spoken in Cavite City comes from the Augustinian priest Martínez de Zúñiga who in his 1803 accounts of his travels in the Philippines, Estadismos de las Islas Filipinas, notes that "In Cavite and in its suburb of San Roque, a very corrupted Spanish is spoken, whose phraseology is entirely taken from the language of the country".

A sample of what is today called Chabacano may be found in dialogues contained in chapters 18 (Supercherías) and 28 (Tatakut) of Filipino writer José Rizal's 1891 work El Filibusterismo.

dijo la voz de mujer alejándose; ¡no quiere pa que di sabé nisos cuando ilos ta sali ingañau!

¡Querida be de praile el cabesa!In the 1883 work of German linguist Hugo Schuchardt Uber das Malaiospanische der Philippinen, he presents fragments of texts and comments of what he calls "Malayo-Spanish".

However, the first to give a general study and investigation of the varieties of Chavacano as a group was by Keith Whinnom in his 1956 work The Spanish Contact Vernaculars in the Philippine Islands .

Whinnom gives an overall view of the history and grammar of what he calls "Ermitaño" of Ermita in Manila, "Caviteño" of Cavite and "Zamboangueño" of Zamboanga.

On 23 June 1635, Zamboanga City, which was part of the Subanon people's ancestral land, became a permanent foothold of the Spanish government with the construction of the San José Fortress.

Bombardment and harassment from pirates and raiders of the sultans of Mindanao and Jolo and the determination to spread Christianity further south (as Zamboanga was a crucial strategic location) of the Philippines forced the Spanish missionary friars to request reinforcements from the colonial government.

Thus, the construction workforce eventually consisted of Spanish, Mexican and Peruvian soldiers, masons from Cavite (who comprised the majority), sacadas from Cebu and Iloilo, and those from the various local tribes of Zamboanga like the Samals and Subanons.

Chavacano becomes a lingua franca of Sulu Archipelago (composing of Sulu, Tawi-tawi, Basilan), as these were formerly part of Western Mindanao (presently named Zamboanga Peninsula), only Isabela City (Basilan's capital) remained part of Zamboanga Peninsula; although North Borneo (now Sabah) is not included on the Spanish East Indies area as stated on the Protocol and control by the United Kingdom, Chavacano has still a little impact in Semporna.

In 1663, the Spanish garrison in Ternate was forced to pull out to defend Manila against an impending invasion by Koxinga, the new ruler of Kingdom of Tungning in Formosa (Taiwan) (sacrificing the Moluccas to the Dutch in doing so).

Additionally Ternateño incorporates alternate language forms for different participles to denote the relationship with the individual being the speaker as well as the listener.

[21] Caviteño Chavacano: Puede nisós hablá: que grande nga palá el sacrificio del mga héroes para niso independencia.

Spanish: Nosotros podemos decir qué grandes sacrificios ofrecieron nuestros héroes para obtener nuestra independencia.

Necesitamos hacer cosas para que sepan que apreciamos a nuestros héroes; que estamos preparados también a sacrificarnos por el pueblo.

Since the propagation of the usage of the Filipino language in education and the media as the national language, Filipino's orthography has affected how certain persons might spell Chavacano, especially since recent generations have grown unfamiliar with Spanish orthography; Most published works, and the general media, however, more often retain Spanish-based spelling systems.

in Zamboanga, an etymological-based approach was formally recently endorsed by the local city government and this is the system used in public schools as part of the mother-tongue policy of the Department of Education for kindergarten to grade 3.

It is uncommon in modern written works to include the acute accent and the trema in writing except in linguistic or highly formalized texts.

Using nunca before the subject to negate the predicate in a subject–verb–object structure denotes strong negation or impossibility for the subject to perform the action in the future: Past Tense Future Tense The Chavacano definite article el precedes a singular noun or a plural marker (for a plural noun).

The Spanish article 'la' for feminine singular nouns does exist in Chavacano, though it occurs rarely and mostly in the formal medium of writing, such as poems and lyrics.

Thus it is common to hear the Blessed Virgin addressed in Chavacano as 'el La Virgen Maria' (the "L" of the 'la' capitalized to signify its permanent position within the noun compound).

For example, continuar, hablar, poner, recibir, and llevar become continuá, hablá, poné, recibí, and llevá with the accent called "acento agudo" on the final syllable.

Chavacano of Zamboangueño uses the words ya (from Spanish ya [already]), ta (from Spanish está [is]), and ay plus the simple form of the verb to convey the basic tenses of past, present, and future respectively: Caviteño uses the words ya, ta, and di plus the simple form of the verb to convey the basic tenses of past, present, and future respectively: While Bahra uses the words a, ta, and di plus the simple form of the verb to convey the basic tenses of past, present, and future respectively: Unlike in the Zamboangueño, Caviteño, and Bahra, Castellano Abakay (Davaoeño) doesn't have the ya and ta prefix.