Tagalog is a part of the Austronesian language family, one of many languages which developed on islands and coasts in the Pacific Ocean. Other Austronesian languages include Hawaiian, Māori and Malay. Tagalog descended from a proto-Philippine language, and it developed in the Central Philippines. Today, it’s one of the most important languages in a country that is in part defined by its linguistic diversity. Here, we’ll provide a bit of a history of the Tagalog language and then look at where it’s spoken today.

A Brief History Of Tagalog

For a while, there was no known record of Philippine languages before the arrival of Spanish colonists. In 1992, however, the Laguna Copperplate Inscription — an old tablet from the 9th century CE  covered with engraved languages — was deciphered and found to contain Javanese, Malay and Sanskrit. Technically, the script is old enough to count as Old Tagalog, as the language has evolved since this inscription.

Most of the early study of the Tagalog language was done by the Spanish, who ruled the Philippines from 1521 to 1898. The first dictionaries were compiled by Spanish missionaries and members of the clergy who collected the vocabulary and grammatical rules of the language. The most enduring Tagalog dictionary is the Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala, originally put out in the 18th century. It has been consistently re-edited and the most recent edition was put out in 2013.

When the Philippines fought for independence at the end of the 19th century, it needed to find ways to unify. The country comprises a number of islands, and there were different languages spoken across them. In 1897, the Biak-na-Bato Constitution was passed, and the writers chose Tagalog as the national language.

That’s not the end of the story, though. When a different Philippine Constitution was put in place in 1935, English and Spanish were made the official languages of the country. This constitution did include a stipulation that a local language should also be chosen for the people, and once again Tagalog was chosen (though the name of the language was changed in 1939 to Wikang Pambansâ, which means “national language”). Later, when the Philippines came under Japanese control during World War II, Tagalog kept its status in the 1943 constitution and was promoted throughout the country.

There were a couple other constitutions put in place in the Philippines — in 1973 and the most recent in 1986 — and each time Tagalog was kept as the official language. The name was shifted, however, first to Pilipino and then to Filipino. Filipino today refers to a standard variety of Tagalog that is used for communication in the Philippines, whereas Tagalog is a collection of dialects spoken in certain parts of the country (and the rest of the world). Part of the reason for the name change is because not everyone wanted this one language to be chosen as a national language, as it’s only one of many in the country. Calling it “Filipino” is a way to make it seem more universal than “Tagalog” did. The only difference between the languages today is that Filipino is used as a lingua franca, meaning it’s widely known so that people from different regions can use it to communicate.

@babbel

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original sound – Babbel

How Many People Speak Tagalog?

The word “Tagalog” means “river dweller,” and it was originally used to refer to a group of people in the Philippines. And while Tagalog can be used to refer to the language spoken all over the Philippines, it more specifically refers to a subset of the languages spoken there.

With that in mind, Tagalog is natively spoken by about 22.5 million people in the Philippines, with an additional 54 million speakers who use it as a second language. It’s concentrated on the islands of Mindoro and Luzon, where the Philippines’ capital Manila is located, but can also be found in various other places in the country.

There are also Tagalog-speaking communities in other parts of the world. There are over 738,000 Tagalog speakers in Canada, and there are about 1.77 million speakers in the United States, making it the fourth most-spoken language in the country and fifth most-spoken in North America. This is because of Filipino migrations, leading to Filipino-American populations primarily in Hawaii, but also in a number of other states. Countries around the Philippines including Kuwait, Japan and Hong Kong also have hundreds of thousands of speakers.

It’s also worth mentioning the use of the Filipino language, which is the official language of the Phillipines. The language is based on Tagalog, but isn’t exactly the same, and despite its official status is not regularly used by people in the country on a day-to-day basis. Instead, it’s a tertiary language that can connect people in the country who may not have a 

What Other Languages Are Spoken In The Philippines?

The Philippines is made up of over 7,000 islands; the most accurate count in recent times puts it at about 7,641. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that there are quite a few languages in the country. One survey found that there are 184 living languages spoken in the country, only nine of which are non-indigenous. Some of these languages are spoken by hundreds of thousands of people, while others are in danger of dying out in the near future.

We won’t list all of the languages here. The only other language nearly as widespread as Filipino is English, which is the other official language of the Philippines. It’s a second language of over 53 million people, and it’s taught in schools. But it’s worth keeping in mind that while English and Filipino get the largest share of attention, the Philippines is full of linguistic and cultural diversity.