Filipino language

Filipino
Wikang Filipino
Native to	Philippines
Native speakers	~88 million speakers, (first and second language speakers N.A.)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Borneo-Philippines Meso Philippines Central Philippines Tagalog Filipino
Official status
Official language in	Philippines
Regulated by	Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language)
Language codes
ISO 639-2	fil
ISO 639-3	fil

Filipino (formerly called Pilipino) is the national language and one of the official languages of the Philippines—the other one being English—as designated in the 1987 Philippine Constitution. The language, a member of the Austronesian languages, is the standardized version of Tagalog. It is sometimes referred to as, albeit incorrectly, the generic name for the several different languages of the Philippines.

History

On November 13, 1937, the First National Assembly created the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa (National Language Institute), which selected Tagalog, the indigenous language with the most developed and extensive written literary tradition (mirroring that of the Tuscan dialect of Italian), as the basis of a new national language. In 1961, this language became known as Pilipino, which was later renamed to Filipino in the 1972 Constitution. Tagalog was chosen as the national language of The Philippines due to the fact that tagalog was the main dialect of the country's capital city and center of trade and commerce, Manila. It was chosen to facilitate trade and commerce so that people may communicate in the same dialect therefore making sure that everyone is understood. A May 13, 1992 resolution further clarified that urban Tagalog is the core basis for Filipino, defining the latter as the "indigenous written and spoken language of Metro Manila and other urban centers in the Philippines used as the language of communication of (sic) ethnic groups."

In 2004 the Filipino language was presented and registered with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It was approved and added to the ISO registry of languages in September 21 2004, and was given the 632-2 code fil. The ramifications of this are quite extensive given today's information and communications technology.

Nature of the language

The national language of the Philippines has been subject to several controversies and misunderstandings, even to this day. The 1987 Constitution of the Philippines, Article XIV, Section 6 merely states: "The national language of the Philippines is Filipino. As it evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages."

Filipino and Tagalog are language names that may refer to the same language, or perhaps they refer to different language variants or even different (but related) languages. There is a continuing controversy whether the distinction is significant, and this section clarifies some of the complex language situation in the Philippines, and the related sociopolitical and linguistic issues that continue to fuel the controversy.

Filipino is the national language of the Philippines, effortlessly spoken and readily understood by at least 30% of the 84 million population, and as a second language by probably more that 80% of the population. Tagalog is widely identified to be the native language of the Tagalog ethnic group, though the Metromanileño dialect is spoken by the non-Tagalog majority of Metro Manila as well. Futhermore Metromanileños keep their parents’ ethnic identity, even if unable to speak the language/s associated with it, and do not normally view themselves as Tagalogs unless they are of Tagalog parentage. The number of native speakers of Tagalog is arguably fewer than the first language speakers of Filipino, because non-Tagalog residents in cities like Cotabato City, which are some distance away from the Tagalog regions of central and southern Luzon, may have Filipino as their first language, but be reluctant to call themselves native speakers of Tagalog if only because they are (ethnically) not native Tagalogs, though this does not explain how Chinese Filipinos, Spanish Filipinos, and other non-Austronesian groups can claim to be native speakers of Tagalog and not native speakers of Fujianese, Spanish, or even Basque. Probably anybody who is a second-language speaker of Filipino can also be called a second-language speaker of Tagalog. The difference is perhaps more significant in the norms of writing and speech than in the number of persons identifiable as speakers of one language variant or the other.

Filipino is an official language of education, but less important than English. It is the major language of the broadcast media and cinema, but less important than English as a language of publication (except in some domains, like comic books, which are meant to speak directly to the Filipino psyche) and less important for academic-scientific-technology discourse. English and Filipino compete in the domains of business and government. Filipino is used as a lingua franca in all regions of the Philippines as well as overseas Filipino communities, and is the dominant language of the armed forces (except perhaps for the small part of the commissioned officer corps from wealthy or upper middle class families) and of a large part of the civil service, most of whom are non-Tagalogs.

Linguistically, the best characterization of the situation is that there is a diasystem (something like Norwegian Nynorsk and Bokmål, but probably with less significant divergence, with considerably less institutional support and cultural importance/recognition of the differences, certainly given that, among Tagalog and Filipino, Filipino alone has legal status as a national language), a single generic language or macrolanguage or L-complex where Filipino and Tagalog are two poles in a spectrum of dialectal and orthographic variation. (Officially, however, it has been declared through a May 1992 resolution that the basis for Filipino is urban Tagalog as spoken in the country's major urban centers.) The spectrum from Filipino to Tagalog is not the only dimension of variation (there are many regional dialects within the Tagalog-speaking region and sociolinguistic variations), but it is arguably the most important dimension for orthography, standardization and intellectualization of language. Preceding all this would have been the selection in 1935 of Tagalog as the national language, akin to the selection in the 1860s of Tuscan as the core base of the Italian language.

(Note that in Philippine English usage, regional languages (or what linguists, both Filipino and international, and most foreigners would call a distinct regional language) are usually referred to as dialects, even though there is a clear recognition of different regional ethnic groups known to have mutually unintelligible forms of speech. For most of the world, two speech varieties of speech are different languages if they are mutually unintelligible; but in the Philippines they are often called dialects even though their relationship is known to be so distant as to be mutually unintelligible. This is also the case in Germany and in Italy, where native languages apart from the standard are termed as dialects.)

Because the name of the Tagalog language is also the name of an ethnic group, it is a politically sensitive issue to claim that Filipino is just Tagalog. As a name for a language variety, the word Tagalog is non-neutral and may be understood as privileging a particular ethnic group. Filipino is arguably a more neutral term, taken from the name of the whole nation rather than just one ethnic group. A counterargument would be that the English language is still called English and not British. According to the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino the absence of the phoneme /f/ in the Tagalog language is the main proof that Filipino isn't simply Tagalog but a language heavily based on Tagalog and but influenced by all the other languages existing within the Islands. Some even argue that words like the Hiligaynon bana (husband)is included in the dictionary published by the KWF as a standard vocabulary.

In an interview made to the former KWF Commissioner Nita Buenaobra in the celebration of the National Language Month, August 2003, she commented that although one cannot call Filipino an artificial language because the vocabulary has meanings in another language (in this case the different Philippine Indegenous Languages), one can still call it pidgin because it is supposed to be a hybrid of all the existing languages in the Archipelago (including Spanish, Arabic, and the different Chinese dialects). She even cited that being a language spoken by the whole Archipelago, one can find native speakers of Filipino in the Visayan dominated island of Mindanao, with General Santos City being its centre.

As a matter of political principle or aspiration, Filipino is not an ethnic language, it is a national language. But we cannot ignore that there is a sociolinguistic phenomenon behind the term Tagalog. In fact, the name Tagalog may be more common for the Filipino-Tagalog diasystem than the name Filipino, even after several decades of the school subject being called Filipino. Most speakers of Filipino-Tagalog are oblivious of the distinction, and are happy to call the language either Filipino or Tagalog. However, because on the connotation and construal of the names, the controversy is not likely to go away any time soon.

Some language policy researchers (notably certain linguists at the University of the Philippines in Diliman) assert that Filipino is a lingua franca, the living speech variety used between ethnic groups in all regions of the country, and its still-emerging orthographic counterpart. From this point of view, Tagalog is not the term for that lingua franca, it is the term that denotes the ethnic language spoken in a certain region of Luzon and some neighboring islands. But arguably, any second language Tagalog-speakers are in fact using Tagalog as a lingua franca. However, the term Tagalog is a non-neutral term for that sociolinguistic phenomenon, and the term Filipino is a more neutral (and thus, allegedly, more scientifically legitimate) way of referring to the language situation.

Advocates of the lingua franca perspective are also unwilling to say that Filipino is "based on" Tagalog, because they claim the lingua franca is a legitimate speech variety in its own right, the official norm (on their reading of the 1987 constitution, and the supporting debates) for the national language is not any particular ethnic language, but the lingua franca already in active use in every region of the Philippines. The lingua franca perspective would presumably tend to define a wider range of speakers as first language speakers of Filipino rather than second language speakers of Tagalog. The children of interethnic marriages in many parts of the country, even where both parents are non-Tagalogs, may be more fluent in Filipino than any other Philippine language or English, and yet they may reside far from the ethnic region of the Tagalogs.

Many commentators on the issue of Filipino and Tagalog, often non-Tagalogs who would prefer that only their regional language and English would occupy the social space currently occupied by Filipino-Tagalog, will claim Filipino is a planned future language that has not yet come into existence. There is also an implication that it never will, and that the whole enterprise is illegitimate. From this perspective, Filipino is supposed to be a merger of many different languages, and since what is currently referred to as Filipino has very little content from regional languages (the dynamism of Filipino comes more from English loanwords and Metromanileño slang and neologism), it is actually Tagalog and there is no such thing as Filipino. The lingua franca perspective would counter that existing lingua franca is easily observed as a legitimate and vibrant language, and that in the various regional dialectal variations of Filipino there is already a significant number of loanwords from regional languages. Admittedly these regional dialectal usages are seldom popularized nationally, especially in comparison to the flood of loanwords from English, but the spoken language basis for such a process of popularization and dissemination is in place. The lingua franca proponents envision a process of popularizing regional dialectal usage derived from regional languages, as the foundation of standardizing and intellectualizing a language, based on a lingua franca not based on Tagalog, that is already dominant nationally in spoken discourse (especially in the broadcast media). That language, the lingua franca they call Filipino, only needs to assert itself more (against the colonial legacy of English) in the realm of writing. Advocates of English (including many regional language advocates) would say that the importance of English is not primarily a matter of an outdated colonial legacy, but that English is the wave of the future, with science, world trade and the Internet become more important every decade.

The lingua franca advocates may respond that the growing influence of English may be true and unstoppable, but that English is an exogenous language that is difficult for the mass of Filipinos to acquire fluently, while tens of millions are acquiring the lingua franca and using it extensively on a daily basis. English will remain a second language, like it is in countries like Finland or the Netherlands, while the endogenous lingua franca of Filipino will come to play a more important role in both speech and writing. National census results show that there are very few native speakers of English in the Philippines, a few percent from a small stratum of wealthy and highly educated families, and it is not increasing very rapidly. On the other hand, Filipino continues to grow vigorously, both as a lingua franca and second language, but also in the number of first language speakers. The growth in first language speakers is in part because of the rapid growth of population metropolitan Manila, mainly through the influx of non-Tagalogs, whose children become first-language Tagalog-speakers; but it is also because there is a shift in lingua franca to Filipino even in parts of the country that are non-Tagalog. Cotabato City is populated by a mixture of Ilonggos, Ilocanos, Chavacanos, Maguindanaos, Tagalogs and Cebuanos, with no ethnic group dominating. In the past, people might have turned to Cebuano as a lingua franca, because Cebuano remains the most important lingua franca in most of Mindanao. Yet in fact, Cotabato City has turned to Filipino as its lingua franca, although it is not an ethnically Tagalog city (as if it matters; if it did, Filipino Anglophones would stop speaking their English mother-tongue because they're not ethnically English). Children growing up in Cotabato City would then, according to lingua-franca advocates, be best considered native speakers of Filipino, not Tagalog. A similar situation is true in Baguio City, where Ilocano used to be the lingua franca among the ethnic Pangasinan, Ilocano, assorted Igorot and Tagalog residents, the language of the public school playground is now Filipino.

The development and formal adoption of a common national language to be known as Filipino had been mandated in Section XV of the 1973 Constitution. Whether the Filipino language should be based on Tagalog is not stated, although a large number of people assumed that Filipino is equivalent to Pilipino, the national language at that time which is clearly based on Tagalog. Most Filipinos will have one of the following assumptions when questioned regarding the Filipino language:

1. Filipino, like its older version, Pilipino, is simply another name for the Tagalog language.
2. Filipino is the amalgamation of all Philippine languages, with English, Spanish and several other Asian languages such as Chinese serving as possible vocabulary sources.
3. Filipino is Tagalog with borrowings from English and other Philippine languages; it is Tagalog as spoken in Metro Manila today.

A similar debate occurred regarding the nature of the Italian language in the 16th century, with views that parallel those currently being put forward regarding the Filipino language. However, most people in the Philippines still consider Filipino as essentially and practically the same language as Tagalog. Filipinos are more likely to ask their countrypeople if they speak "Tagalog" rather than "Filipino." Proponents of the second view however, specifically state that Tagalog does not include words such as gwapa (beautiful,feminine), those terms whose meaning can be easily guessed by native Tagalog speakers but are not generally considered or used in the Tagalog-speaking region. Some people also point out that Filipino should include or by nature includes English words commonly used by Filipinos whereas Tagalog does not. During the time when the language was still known as Pilipino (before the name was changed to Filipino), the tendency was towards purism, even trying to replace words of Spanish or English origin with new artificially coined words that are based on Tagalog. To some people, and indeed as promoted and taught in high-school classrooms, this differentiates Filipino from Pilipino.

A number of academics define the Filipino language as an amalgamation of Philippine languages. Some of these academics have proposed that English words be included in the Filipino lexicon. The problem with this view is that linguistically, Philippine languages are not dialects of the same language, but are separate and distinct languages in their own right. If the grammatical structure and all the words from other Philippine languages are to be included in Filipino, then the purpose of a lingua franca is forfeited: people speaking Tagalog Filipino will not be able to communicate effectively with someone speaking Cebuano Filipino. It could be argued however that a common core lexicon could emerge over time as a result of certain words or grammatical or phonological structures (such as double consonants in Ilocano, etc.) being widely and continuously used while certain others being abandoned, a case of linguistic natural selection.

If Filipino is accepted as an amalgamation of Austronesian languages in the Philippines, Spanish, as well as English that is based on Tagalog grammar, then perhaps its most realistic embodiment is the Tagalog dialect spoken in Metro Manila. With Metro Manila's migrant population swelling, words from other Philippine languages have been absorbed into dialect. Tagalog as spoken in the capital, however, is difficult to use as a standard. It is rapidly and constantly evolving, and there is no dictionary or guidebook to define what is proper usage or which words are considered to be officially part of the language. This is compounded by the problem that middle- and upper-class Filipinos are bilingual or multilingual, predominantly using English, Taglish (Tagalog heavily mixed with English), or Englog in everyday conversation. The latter two essentially are used for informal communication, however, and it is generally not acceptable in formal written communication for government, academia, or business. A May 13, 1992 resolution, however, strengthens the notion of urban Tagalog being the core basis for Filipino, defining the latter as the "indigenous written and spoken language of Metro Manila and other urban centers in the Philippines used as the language of communication of (sic) ethnic groups."

So educated opinion in the Philippines about the status and relationship of Filipino and Tagalog remains divided, and the controversies do not seem to be subsiding or disappearing. The disagreements are not simply about matters of fact, although there are plenty of interesting facts involved; it is also about incompatible conceptual frameworks, with socio-political and linguistic-theory nuances, that are used to understand and name those factual situations. There are competing perspectives that seem logical within their own assumptions; perhaps only history will tell which account of Tagalog and Filipino is a better characterization of the current situation and dynamic.

Orthography

Main article: Filipino orthography

Originally, the Balarila ng Wikang Pambansa introduced the Abakada of 20 letters in which each distinct sound in Tagalog has only one letter to represent it - unlike, say, the letters 'c' and 'k' in English. The 20 letters of Abakada are written as a b k d e g h i l m n ng (where ng is considered as only one letter.) o p r s t u w y. The National Language Institute of the Philippines initiated the new language in 1973. In 1976, the alphabet consisted of 31 letters—the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the Spanish ñ, ll, rr, and ch, and the ng of Tagalog. In practice, however, the digraphs are considered as their two constituent letters. In 1987, the alphabet was revised and rr, ll and ch, all of which are of Spanish origin, were removed, leaving 28 letters.

Today, there is no one uniform standard of Tagalog orthography. Even within standards, inconsistencies abound (such as the lack of rules regarding /nk/ and /ngk/, /sy/ and /siy/, etc.). In 2001 the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) issued a revision of Filipino orthography, dealing primarily with words of Spanish origin (permitting the use of /f/, /v/, and others in words such as Filipinas, revis(i)yon, alfabeto, ventilador, etc.; it should be noted however that [v] does not exist as a separate phoneme in Spanish, and that the implementation of the 2001 spelling revision has been suspended due to opposition from educators and students.

Universities, however, publish the bulk of self-described Filipino-language material, and have each adopted their own approaches as to how the language should be spelled (and indeed, of the nature of the language itself). The University of the Philippines, for one, seems to have taken a more conservative approach compared to the KWF, retaining in its UP Filipino Dictionary (UPDF) the /p/ in assimilated words such as perpeksiyon and pamilya while insisting on /f/ in words such as Filipinas (so as to be consistent with Filipino) and fermentasyon. The UPDF also refuses to transcribe yet unassimilated foreign words (aside from those of Spanish origin) phonetically (e.g. nitrogen, nematocyst), let alone whole phrases (e.g. figure of speech, filing cabinet, noble savage).

See also

• Commission on the Filipino language, the official regulating body of the Filipino language
• UP Filipino Dictionary
• Filipino alphabet
• Languages of the Philippines
• Filipino grammar
• Leo James English

External links

• Commission on the Filipino Language
• Language planning in multilingual countries: The case of the Philippines, discussion by linguist and educator Andrew Gonzalez
• The Metamorphosis of Filipino as a National Language
• Filipinized transcription as applied in one blog
• Filipino Languages - links about Filipino languages
• Information on learning Filipino