Philippine Spanish

This article is about Spanish as used in the Philippines. For a more general overview of the language, see Spanish language in the Philippines.

Not to be confused with Chavacano, Spanish Filipino, or Spanish people of Filipino ancestry.

Philippine Spanish
español filipino castellano filipino
Native to	Philippines
Speakers	Native: 4,000 (2020) Proficient: 400,000 (2020) Total: 1 million (2014)
Language family	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Romance Western Ibero-Romance West Iberian Castilian Spanish Philippine Spanish
Early forms	Old Latin Classical Latin Vulgar Latin Old Spanish Early Modern Spanish
Writing system	Latin (Spanish alphabet)
Official status
Recognised minority language in	Philippines
Regulated by	Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
IETF	es-PH

Philippine Spanish (Spanish: español filipino or castellano filipino) is a Spanish dialect and a variant of standard Spanish native to the Philippines, spoken mostly by Spanish Filipinos.

Spanish as spoken in the Philippines contains a number of features that distinguish it from other varieties of Spanish. Although it uses vosotros as in Peninsular and Equatoguinean Spanish, it shares with Latin American Spanish the use of seseo, and is one of only a few Spanish dialects that does not use yeísmo as standard. Philippine Spanish also employs vocabulary unique to the dialect, reflecting influence from the native languages of the Philippines as well as broader sociolinguistic trends in Spanish, and is considered to be more linguistically conservative and uniform than Spanish spoken elsewhere.

Officially regulated by the Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language (AFLE), up to a million people in the Philippines are claimed to be either proficient in or have knowledge of Spanish, with around 4,000 people claiming Spanish as their native language, although estimates vary widely.

Distribution and number of speakers

Philippine Spanish speakers may be found nationwide, mostly in urban areas but with the largest concentration of speakers in Metro Manila. Smaller communities are found particularly in regions where the economy is dominated by large agricultural plantations, such as the sugarcane-producing regions of Negros, particularly around Bacolod and Dumaguete, and in the fruit-producing regions of Mindanao, particularly around Cagayan de Oro and Davao City. Other centers where Spanish-speaking populations can be found include the cities of Cebu, Iloilo and Zamboanga. Most native Philippine Spanish speakers are part of the country's middle and upper classes.

Estimates as to the number of Spanish speakers in the Philippines vary widely, with estimates ranging from the thousands to the millions. In 2014, the Instituto Cervantes estimated that there were around one million Spanish speakers in the Philippines, regardless of level of proficiency, while in 2023 Maria Luisa Young, professor of Spanish and head of the Department of Modern Languages at the Ateneo de Manila University, estimated without confidence that around 500,000 people in the Philippines either speak or at least know Spanish. A 2022 report by the IC, meanwhile, estimated that there are around 460,000 Spanish speakers in the Philippines, though only counting Spaniards in the Philippines as native speakers, including speakers of the various Chavacano dialects in the total, and excluding Filipinos who studied Spanish in universities before 1986. In the 2020 Philippine census, the Philippine Statistics Authority reported that only 167 households nationwide spoke Spanish at home, while a 2020 estimate places the number of native speakers at around 4,000 people.

Accurately counting Spanish speakers in the Philippines is complicated by the Philippine government not keeping updated official statistics, with the last supposedly reliable statistics on the number of speakers dating back to 2008. That estimate placed the number of native Spanish speakers at around 6,000, with an additional two million Filipinos who speak Spanish either as a second or third language and another 1.2 million Chavacano speakers, and that number possibly being larger due to increasing interest in learning Spanish among Filipinos for professional reasons.

In addition to reported estimates of speakers, it is believed that there is an undetermined but significant number of Spanish semi-speakers, Filipinos whose knowledge of Spanish is below that of native speakers but is considered to be superior to that of foreign students.

Status and future

Main article: Spanish language in the Philippines

Compared to other Spanish varieties, Philippine Spanish is among the least studied, and many contemporary studies that claim to talk about the dialect were, in fact, either dealing with Spanish loanwords in the native languages of the Philippines or, more erroneously, to the various Chavacano dialects to which it was often mistakenly confused for.

Philippine Spanish has been described as being "moribund", with most speakers also being fluent in English and the Philippine languages, and the language having few native speakers under the age of 40, with many of its speakers also living outside the Philippines. In part due to the American colonization of the Philippines, where English was pushed as the language of government and education, and the implementation of a Tagalog-based national language (which would later become Filipino), use of Spanish declined, particularly after World War II when English was entrenched as the language of social prestige. Spanish-speaking Filipinos mostly use the language at home, with use of the language in public being limited by a lack of speakers and hostility from non-Spanish speaking Filipinos toward the language, although many Filipinos who previously studied Spanish while it was still mandatory are capable of sustaining a conversation that reasonably approximates the language.

This, however, contrasts with recent trends concerning Spanish in the Philippines more broadly, on the one hand due to changing attitudes toward the language among non-Spanish speaking Filipinos, and on the other due to the growing prestige of the language worldwide. Starting in 2009 Spanish was reintroduced as part of the basic education curriculum in a number of public high schools, becoming the largest foreign language program offered by the public school system, with over 7,000 students studying the language in the 2021–2022 school year alone. The local business process outsourcing industry has also contributed to the growing popularity of Spanish as Spanish speakers have a larger earnings potential than English speakers in the industry. A new generation of Spanish speakers has since emerged as a result, most of whom are second-language speakers with some learning the language to show national pride, though there exists within this group a smaller number of first-language Spanish speakers who are learning the language at home from their second-language parents.

Phonology

See also: Spanish phonology

Philippine Spanish phonology has been described as conservative and refined, reflecting the socioeconomic status of its speakers, and exhibiting features largely present in the standard northern dialects of Peninsular Spanish as spoken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with little influence from more divergent Spanish dialects such as Andalusian, Canarian and Catalan despite significant immigration to the Philippines from those areas of Spain. Nevertheless, a number of phonological traits still distinguish Philippine Spanish from Spanish spoken elsewhere as a result of earlier contact with Latin American Spanish varieties, contact with the Philippine languages and the development of Chavacano.

Unlike with Philippine English, Philippine Spanish phonology is also generally uniform, with very little (if any) dialectical variation in terms of pronunciation between speakers of Spanish from different regions of the country.

Lleísmo (y/ll distinction)

As in some dialects in northern Spain and in some bilingual zones (Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru) in Latin America, Philippine Spanish practices lleísmo, where there is a phonological distinction between the sounds represented by 'll' (/ʎ/) and 'y' (/ʝ/). For example, "silla" (/ˈsiʝa/) is pronounced /ˈsiʎa/ (Tagalog "silya"), although some younger Philippine Spanish speakers pronounce /ʎ/ closer to /lj/. Sometimes /ʎ/ is depalatatized to /l/ in word-initial positions: for example, "lluvia" (/ˈʎubja/) becomes /ˈlubja/.

While yeísmo, which merges the two, is today considered extremely rare and idiosyncratic in Philippine Spanish, it has been suggested that a more yeísta pronunciation was previously standard owing to the influence of both Andalusian and Mexican Spanish speakers in the 16th and 17th centuries. Speakers only shifted to a more lleísta pronunciation toward the end of the 19th century, in the final years of Spanish colonization.

Newer generations of Spanish speakers have begun adopting phonological features closer to standard Peninsular Spanish, including yeísmo, as a result of being educated in that dialect.

Seseo

As in Latin American Spanish, Philippine Spanish originally practiced seseo, where /θ/ is normally not distinguished from /s/. This is particularly evidenced by borrowings into the Philippine languages where, for example, the Spanish word "cerveza" (/seɾˈbesa/) became Tagalog "serbesa". Although seseo remains the dominant pronunciation today, similar to the introduction of lleísmo at the end of the 19th century some native speakers began practicing distinción, where /θ/ is distinguished from /s/, but don't do so consistently.

Newer generations of Spanish speakers have begun adopting distinción as a result of being educated in Peninsular Spanish, alongside a contemporary adoption of yeísmo.

Palatalization and affrication

Before certain vowel combinations, /d/ and /t/ are often palatized by Philippine Spanish speakers, becoming /dʲ/ and /tʲ/ respectively. Occasionally these would be affricated instead, becoming [dʒ] and [tʃ] respectively as in the case of Spanish loans to the Philippine languages. For example, "Dios" (/ˈdjos/) would be pronounced [ˈd͡ʒos] (Tagalog "Diyos"), or "tiangue" (/ˈtjaŋɡe/) would be pronounced [ˈt͡ʃaŋɡe] (Tagalog "tiyangge").

Retraction of /x/ to [h]

The velar jota sound /x/ is present in Philippine Spanish, similar to standard Peninsular Spanish, though this is sometimes retracted to glottal [h], which also occurs in Andalusian, Caribbean, Canarian, and Colombian Spanish.

Merger of non-open vowels and bilabial consonants

Often interchanged in Philippine Spanish are the non-open vowels /e/ and /i/, /o/ and /u/, and the bilabial consonants /p/ and /f/. For example, Filipinas [piliˈpinas] (Tagalog "Pilipinas"), entender [intinˈdiɾ] (Tagalog "intindi") and ojal [uˈhal] (Tagalog "uhal").

No aspiration of /s/

Unlike many Spanish and Latin American dialects, syllable-final "s" is always pronounced as an alveolar sibilant [s], rather than a glottal fricative [h]. For example, "amores secos" [aˈmoɾes ˈsekos]. The retention of "s" is reflective of the influence of northern Peninsular Spanish dialects, although it is considered an unusual development in Philippine Spanish given the large number of Andalusian Spanish speakers among the last wave of Spanish migrants to the Philippines.

In contrast, Chavacano speakers do practice syllable-final S-dropping, most notably among older Zamboagueño speakers.

Glottal stop

The glottal stop [ʔ] manifests in Philippine Spanish with words where the pronounciation begins with a vowel, whereas in other Spanish dialects these would be subject to consonantal linking (similar to the liaison in French). For example, el hombre would be pronounced as [elˈʔombɾe] in Philippine Spanish but [eˈlombɾe] in other Spanish dialects. This also manifests with some vowel combinations, where maíz (corn) would be pronounced [maˈʔis] in Philippine Spanish. This is influenced by the Philippine languages and is found among most (if not all) Philippine Spanish speakers.

[ɾ–l] shift at the end of syllables

Philippine Spanish clearly distinguishes between the use of [ɾ] and [l] at the end of a syllable of a word or a word itself, similar to standard Peninsular Spanish. However, earlier speakers may have interchanged both sounds, with /l/ becoming [ɾ] and /ɾ/ becoming [l] as in Andalusian and Caribbean Spanish, and which was retained in the various Chavacano dialects.

Morphology and syntax

Philippine Spanish has been described as having no particularly unique morphological features, although deviations from standard Spanish morphology and syntax have been reported as a result of Spanish's position as a minority language in the Philippines.

Alongside Equatoguinean Spanish, Philippine Spanish is one of only two Spanish dialects outside of Spain to use the second-person plural pronoun vosotros, although ustedes, standard in Latin America, has been reported as also being common in written texts. The second-person familiar pronoun tú is also freely used, even in situations where the polite pronoun usted would be used instead, and while the various Chavacano dialects developed the use of voseo, this development is absent in Philippine Spanish, which is exclusively tuteante.

Unlike other overseas Spanish dialects, Philippine Spanish is said to employ leísmo, where the pronoun le is used when referring to third-person masculine direct objects instead of lo as is the case elsewhere, although others have said this only represents a minority of speakers and that Philippine Spanish speakers mostly use lo. However, for indirect objects, the use of le is predominant, with a minority of speakers using la (laísmo).

Indicating possession in Philippine Spanish is frequently expressed not through possessive adjectives, but rather by combining the object with the construction de ("of") and the possessor. For example, instead of nuestros parientes ("our relatives") as in standard Spanish, Philippine Spanish speakers would often say los parientes de nosotros ("the relatives of us"). This also happens with the third-person possessive pronoun su, which parallels Latin American usage with speakers alternating between, for example, Este perro es suyo ("This dog is theirs") and Este perro es de él ("This dog is of him").

Vocabulary

See also: List of Spanish words of Austronesian origin

Over the centuries Philippine Spanish has developed a corpus of filipinismos (“Philippinisms”), vocabulary and expressions that are unique to the dialect, of which some have even entered Spanish more broadly and others which have influenced the native languages of the Philippines. Philippinisms in Philippine Spanish are usually derived from a number of sources: words borrowed into Spanish from the Philippine languages, Spanish words that have since fallen out of use in Spain or in Spanish more broadly, and Spanish expressions made by Philippine Spanish speakers or are otherwise unique to the country. Since the mid-20^th century, the Philippine Spanish lexicon has also been significantly influenced by English, similar to the situation with Spanish in Puerto Rico and the United States.

Although there are efforts in documenting filipinismos, many of them are in danger of disappearing due to the "foreignization" of Spanish language education in the Philippines (as Peninsular instead of Philippine Spanish is taught in schools), alongside poor documentation practices which lead to, among others, some expressions not being documented and some whose origin is obscured, and a lack of a stronger effort to compile a comprehensive dictionary of these expressions, or at least to include them in the Diccionario de la lengua española.

From Latin American Spanish

Philippine Spanish incorporates a number of words and expressions from Latin American Spanish varieties, most notably from Mexican Spanish but also including influences from other dialects. Words like metate, tiangue and chongo reflect this influence, as well as the use of certain hypocorisms.

Latin American influence in Philippine Spanish is also reflected in the use of Americanisms like maní to describe peanuts and hincarse to describe kneeling, instead of the Peninsular Spanish equivalents cacahuete (or even the Mexican variant cacahuate) and arrodillarse, as well as in the use of Mexican expressions like ¿mande?.

From Peninsular Spanish

Peninsular Spanish started to influence the vocabulary of Philippine languages after the Philippines was administered directly from Spain. For instance, Philippine Spanish uses "patata" (potato) instead of "papa", "gamba" (shrimp) instead of "camarón", "vosotros" (you, informal plural) instead of "ustedes", "melocotón" (peach) instead of "durazno", etc.

Unique words and expressions

Many words and expressions used by Spanish speakers in the Philippines are unique to Philippine Spanish, though a number of these have since entered the Diccionario de la lengua española and other publications of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). Some of the first filipinismos incorporated by the RAE into its publications include words like caracoa, barangay and parao, which entered the broader lexicon in the late 18th and early 19th century, and the number of filipinismos has ostensibly grown over time.

Unique words and expressions in Philippine Spanish can be broadly placed into four categories:

• Words and expressions borrowed into Philippine Spanish, or even Spanish more broadly, as a result of contact with the Philippine languages (such as bolo, which was borrowed from the Tagalog bolo, or baguio to describe typhoons). However, the extent of borrowing has varied: borrowing from the Philippine languages, or even from other languages like Chinese, into Philippine Spanish has been described as either being mainly limited to flora and fauna, contrasting with the significant influence played by Philippine languages in the development of Chavacano, or as being more varied but with loans largely being limited to sociocultural domains like food.
• Words and expressions that have fallen out of use in other Spanish dialects, but were retained in Philippine Spanish (such as aparador to describe a wardrobe, whereas other Spanish dialects would use armario, the use of aeroplano instead of avión to describe an airplane, or the use of the dated phrase ¿Cuál es su gracia? to ask for someone's name, which has since died out in other countries)
• Words and expressions that have undergone a semantic change in Philippine Spanish (such as lenguaje to refer to a national language)
• Words and expressions in Philippine Spanish that were developed in the Philippines by Spanish speakers and have no equivalents in other Spanish dialects (such as abrazador to describe a cylindrical sleeping pillow similar to a bolster)

Many filipinismos that are commonly used in the Philippines, such as pan de sal and cundimán, by both Spanish and non-Spanish speakers alike have yet to be recognized by the RAE.

See also

• Spanish dialects and varieties
• Spanish language in the Philippines
• Philippine literature in Spanish
• Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language

References

Bibliography

• Andrés Barrenechea, Clarissa (June 2013). La enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera en Filipinas. Estudio de caso de la Universidad Ateneo de Manila [The Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language in the Philippines: Case Study of the Ateneo de Manila University] (PDF) (Master) (in Spanish). Autonomous University of Zacatecas. Retrieved April 8, 2023.
• Donoso Jiménez, Isaac (Summer 2018). "Introducción a la lexicología filipina y al filipinismo léxico" [Introduction to Filipino Lexicology and Lexical Filipinism] (PDF). Revista Filipina (in Spanish). 5 (1): 27–36. ISSN 1496-4538. Retrieved April 8, 2023.
• El español: una lengua viva. Informe 2022 [Spanish: A Living Language – 2022 Report] (PDF) (Report) (in Spanish). Instituto Cervantes. 2022. Retrieved April 8, 2023.
• Flores Sigg, Santiago; Ramírez Luengo, José Luis (2019). "El léxico del español filipino del siglo XIX según el Vocabulario de modismos manileños de V. M. Abella (1874): los indigenismos" [The lexicon of 19th. century Philippines Spanish according to V. M. Abella's Vocabulario de modismos manileños (1874): the indigenisms]. Lengua y Habla (in Spanish) (23). University of the Andes: 299–310. eISSN 2244-811X. Retrieved April 9, 2023.
• Lipski, John M. (January 1986). "On the Reduction of /S/ in Philippine Creole Spanish: Implications for Historical Spanish Dialectology" (PDF). Diachronica. 3 (1): 43–66. ISSN 0176-4225. Retrieved April 9, 2023.
• Lipski, John M. (December 1986). "Contemporary Philippine Spanish: Comments on Vestigial Usage" (PDF). Philippine Journal of Linguistics. 17 (2): 37–48. ISSN 0048-3796. Retrieved April 8, 2023.
• Lipski, John M. (1986). "Las hablas hispanofilipinas: eslabón entre tres continentes" [Spanish Filipino Speech: The Link Between Three Continents] (PDF). Foro Literario (in Spanish). IX (15–16): 75–79. OCLC 4158092. Retrieved April 8, 2023.
• Lipski, John M. (2012). "Características lingüísticas del español filipino y del chabacano" [Linguistic Characteristics of Philippine Spanish and Chavacano] (PDF). In Donoso Jiménez, Isaac (ed.). Historia cultural de la lengua española en Filipinas: ayer y hoy [Cultural History of the Spanish Language in the Philippines: Then and Now] (in Spanish). Madrid: Editorial Verbum. pp. 307–323. ISBN 978-84-7962-812-3. Retrieved April 8, 2023.
• Moreno de Alba, José G. (2011). "Sobre la eliminación del pronombre vosotros en el español americano" [On the Elimination of the Personal Pronoun Vosotros in the Spanish Language in the Americas] (PDF). Cuadernos de la ALFAL (in Spanish) (2). Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina: 25–39. ISSN 2218-0761. Retrieved April 12, 2023.
• Quilis, Antonio (1992). La lengua española en cuatro mundos [The Spanish Language in Four Worlds] (in Spanish). Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE. ISBN 84-7100-522-0. Retrieved April 14, 2023 – via the Biblioteca Virtual de Polígrafos.
• Quilis, Antonio (1993). "La lengua española en Filipinas y en Guinea Ecuatorial" [The Spanish Language in the Philippines and in Equatorial Guinea]. Boletín Informativo de la Fundación Juan March (in Spanish) (Ensayo: La lengua española, hoy [Essay: The Spanish Language, Today], VIII). Fundación Juan March: 3–16. ISSN 0210-4148. Retrieved April 12, 2023.
• Quilis, Antonio; Casado-Fresnillo, Celia (2008). La lengua española en Filipinas: historia, situación actual, el chabacano, antología de textos [The Spanish Language in the Philippines: History, Current Situation, Chavacano, Anthology of Texts]. Madrid: Spanish National Research Council. ISBN 978-84-00-08635-0.
• Quilis, Antonio; Casado-Fresnillo, Celia; Quilis-Sanz, María José (January–April 1997). "Los filipinismos y otras palabras de Filipinas contenidas en el «Diccionario» de la Academia" [Filipinisms and Other Words from the Philippines Contained in the "Dictionary" of the Royal Spanish Academy] (PDF). Boletín de la Real Academia Española (in Spanish). 57 (270). Royal Spanish Academy: 7–55. ISSN 0210-4822. Retrieved April 9, 2023.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Rodríguez-Ponga, Rafael (September–December 2000). "Baguio, filipinismo en español" [Baguio, a Filipinism in Spanish] (PDF). Boletín de la Real Academia Española (in Spanish). 80 (281). Royal Spanish Academy: 397–414. ISSN 0210-4822. Retrieved April 9, 2023.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Sánchez Jiménez, David (October 2012). "Permanencia y proyección del español en Filipinas en el siglo XXI" [Permanence and Projection of Spanish in the Philippines in the 21st Century]. Revista Cronopio (in Spanish) (34). ISSN 2248-5406. Retrieved April 14, 2023 – via ResearchGate.
• Steinkrüger, Patrick O. (2008). "Hispanisation processes in the Philippines". In Stolz, Thomas; Bakker, Dik; Salas Palomo, Rosa (eds.). Hispanisation: The Impact of Spanish on the Lexicon and Grammar of the Indigenous Languages of Austronesia and the Americas. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 203–236. doi:10.1515/9783110207231.2.203. ISBN 978-3-11-019793-8. ISSN 0933-761X.

External links

• "El español en Filipinas. Un idioma de Estado" ("Spanish in the Philippines: A State Language"), a history of Spanish in the Philippines by the Instituto Cervantes (in Spanish)
• El Idioma Español en Filipinas (The Spanish Language in the Philippines), a documentary produced by the Asociación Cultural Galeón de Manila featuring several Spanish-speaking Filipinos (in Spanish)
• Laboratorio de Fonética Antonio Quilis – La lengua española en Filipinas, a series of recordings made by Antonio Quilis and Celia Casado-Fresnillo documenting the speech of Philippine Spanish and Chavacano speakers (in Spanish)