Toward a taxonomy of trait adjectives in Filipino: comparing personality lexicons across cultures

We have developed a comprehensive list of Filipino person descriptive adjectives, organized them into Angleitner, Ostendorf and John's (1990) person descriptive categories, obtained college students' (N = 1048) trait prototypicality judgments, and compared the Filipino trait lexicon to an English trait (Goldberg, 1990) taxonomy based on the Big Five personality domains. Differences in the relative size of different person descriptive categories were noted between the Filipino and German languages. The Filipino person descriptive lexicon appears to be roughly comparable in size to the person descriptive or personality relevant lexicons in the German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian languages, but substantially smaller than the English person descriptive lexicon. Nonetheless, the Filipino trait lexicon makes distinctions comparable to those encompassed by the English taxonomic categories. As in the English language, the Big Five Agreeableness domain is the most lexically elaborated in Filipino, followed by Surgency and Conscientiousness, Intellect, and Emotional Stability. That is, the largest trait domains may be those with the most direct interpersonal reference.