Austronesian Linguistics
While at the University of Illinois Bloomfield undertook research on Tagalog, an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines. He carried out linguistic field work with Alfredo Viola Santiago, who was an engineering student at the university from 1914-1917. The results were published as Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis, which includes a series of texts dictated by Santiago in addition to an extensive grammatical description and analysis of every word in the texts. Bloomfield’s work on Tagalog, from the beginning of field research to publication, took no more than two years. His study of Tagalog has been described as “…the best treatment of any Austronesian language…The result is a description of Tagalog which has never been surpassed for completeness, accuracy, and wealth of exemplification.”
Bloomfield's only other publication on an Austronesian language was an article on the syntax of Ilocano, based upon research undertaken with a native speaker of Ilocano who was a student at Yale University. This article has been described as a "…tour de force, for it covers in less than seven pages the entire taxonomic syntax of Ilocano."
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