Walk through Mangagoy or Poblacion and you will mostly hear Cebuano. But Bislig also lies within the home area of a separate local language called Kamayo, one of the lesser-known languages of the Philippines.
What Kamayo is
Kamayo, also spelled Camayo and known as Kinamayo, is an Austronesian language of the central eastern coast of Mindanao, according to its Wikipedia entry. The same source lists other names for it, including Kadi and Kinadi.
Glottolog, the language catalog maintained by linguists at the Max Planck Institute, classifies Kamayo as a Central Philippine language within the Greater Central Philippine group, the same broad family that includes Cebuano, Tagalog and Hiligaynon. Glottolog places it in the Mansakan subgroup, alongside languages spoken in the Davao region.
Where it is spoken
Wikipedia lists the areas where Kamayo is spoken as the city of Bislig and the municipalities of Barobo, Hinatuan, Lingig, Tagbina, Lianga, San Agustin and Marihatag in Surigao del Sur, as well as parts of Davao Oriental. It also cites Ethnologue as reporting Kamayo use in border areas of Agusan del Sur and in Davao Oriental between Lingig and Boston.
In other words, Bislig sits near the middle of the Kamayo-speaking stretch of coast, with neighboring Lingig, Hinatuan, Barobo and Tagbina all part of the same language area.
It changes from town to town
Kamayo is not uniform. Wikipedia notes that it varies from one municipality to another, and that dialects can be broadly grouped into North Kamayo and South Kamayo. Speakers in Lingig are described as sounding quite different from those in other towns, and Barobo, Hinatuan and Lingig are each said to have a distinct version.
In Bislig itself, Wikipedia says the way Kamayo is spoken has been shaped by mixing with Cebuano, particularly in Barangays Mangagoy and Poblacion. That fits Bislig's history: the PICOP paper mill drew workers from all over the country from the 1960s onward, and Cebuano became the everyday language of the busy town center. The city's own Wikipedia entry puts it simply: Kamayo is sometimes used by residents, but most usually speak Cebuano.
A few features
One example often cited is how Kamayo marks the superlative. Wikipedia gives the Bislig forms "gamayay" (from gamay, small) and "dako-ay" (from dako, big), where a suffix is added to the adjective.
A 2019 study by Teresa May A. Mundiz in the JPAIR Multidisciplinary Research Journal compared children's songs in Surigaonon and Kamayo. It found differences in morphology, including inflectional affixes and grammatical markers, and observed that Kamayo speakers could understand Surigaonon. The study refers to the local variety as "Bisliganon Kamayo."
How many people speak it?
This is where the sources disagree. Wikipedia's infobox gives a figure in the hundreds of thousands, attributed to the 2000 census, while the Rosetta Project cites a much smaller count of a few thousand speakers. The large gap likely reflects the difference between counting an ethnic population and counting people who actually speak the language. No recent, Bislig-specific count could be found.
Why it matters
Small languages like Kamayo are part of what makes a place distinct. Bislig's Sangguniang Panlungsod passed an ordinance in July 2026 institutionalizing cultural mapping in the city, which is the kind of work that documents local heritage, including language. If your grandparents still speak Kamayo at home, their words are part of that record.