Tagalog language

Diariong Tagalog (Tagalog Newspaper), the first bilingual newspaper in the Philippines founded in 1882 written in both Tagalog and Spanish.

Tagalog was declared the official language by the first revolutionary constitution in the Philippines, the Constitution of Biak-na-Bato in 1897.[15]

In 1935, the Philippine constitution designated English and Spanish as official languages, but mandated the development and adoption of a common national language based on one of the existing native languages.[16] After study and deliberation, the National Language Institute, a committee composed of seven members who represented various regions in the Philippines, chose Tagalog as the basis for the evolution and adoption of the national language of the Philippines.[17][18] President Manuel L. Quezon then, on December 30, 1937, proclaimed the selection of the Tagalog language to be used as the basis for the evolution and adoption of the national language of the Philippines.[17] In 1939, President Quezon renamed the proposed Tagalog-based national language as Wikang Pambansâ (national language).[18] Under the Japanese puppet government during World War II, Tagalog as a national language was strongly promoted; the 1943 Constitution specifying: The government shall take steps toward the development and propagation of Tagalog as the national language.".

In 1959, the language was further renamed as "Pilipino".[18] Along with English, the national language has had official status under the 1973 constitution (as "Pilipino")[19] and the present 1987 constitution (as Filipino).

The adoption of Tagalog in 1937 as basis for a national language is not without its own controversies. Instead of specifying Tagalog, the national language was designated as Wikang Pambansâ ("National Language") in 1939.[17][20] Twenty years later, in 1959, it was renamed by then Secretary of Education, José Romero, as Pilipino to give it a national rather than ethnic label and connotation. The changing of the name did not, however, result in acceptance among non-Tagalogs, especially Cebuanos who had not accepted the selection.[18]

The national language issue was revived once more during the 1971 Constitutional Convention. The majority of the delegates were even in favor of scrapping the idea of a "national language" altogether.[21] A compromise solution was worked out—a "universalist" approach to the national language, to be called Filipino rather than Pilipino. The 1973 constitution makes no mention of Tagalog. When a new constitution was drawn up in 1987, it named Filipino as the national language.[18] The constitution specified that as the Filipino language evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages. However, more than two decades after the institution of the "universalist" approach, there seems to be little if any difference between Tagalog and Filipino.

Many of the older generation in the Philippines feel that the replacement of English by Tagalog in the popular visual media has had dire economic effects regarding the competitiveness of the Philippines in trade and overseas remittances.[22]

Upon the issuance of Executive Order No. 134, Tagalog was declared as basis of the National Language. On 12 April 1940, Executive No. 263 was issued ordering the teaching of the national language in all public and private schools in the country.[23]

Article XIV, Section 6 of the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines specifies, in part:

Subject to provisions of law and as the Congress may deem appropriate, the Government shall take steps to initiate and sustain the use of Filipino as a medium of official communication and as language of instruction in the educational system.[24]

Under Section 7, however:

The regional languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary media of instruction therein.[24]

In 2009, the Department of Education promulgated an order institutionalizing a system of mother-tongue based multilingual education ("MLE"), wherein instruction is conducted primarily in a student's mother tongue (one of the various regional Philippine languages) until at least grade three, with additional languages such as Filipino and English being introduced as separate subjects no earlier than grade two. In secondary school, Filipino and English become the primary languages of instruction, with the learner's first language taking on an auxiliary role.[25] After pilot tests in selected schools, the MLE program was implemented nationwide from School Year (SY) 2012–2013.[26][27]

Tagalog is the first language of a quarter of the population of the Philippines (particularly in Central and Southern Luzon) and the second language for the majority.[28]

Distribution of Tagalog dialects in the Philippines. The color-schemes represent the four dialect zones of the language: Northern, Central, Southern and Marinduque. While the majority of residents in Camarines Norte and Camarines Sur traditionally speak Bikol as their first language, these provinces nonetheless have significant Tagalog minorities. In addition, Tagalog is used as a second language throughout the country.

At present, no comprehensive dialectology has been done in the Tagalog-speaking regions, though there have been descriptions in the form of dictionaries and grammars of various Tagalog dialects. Ethnologue lists Manila, Lubang, Marinduque, Bataan (Western Central Luzon), Batangas, Bulacan (Eastern Central Luzon), Tanay-Paete (Rizal-Laguna), and Tayabas (Quezon and Aurora) as dialects of Tagalog; however, there appear to be four main dialects, of which the aforementioned are a part: Northern (exemplified by the Bulacan dialect), Central (including Manila), Southern (exemplified by Batangas), and Marinduque.

Some example of dialectal differences are:

• Many Tagalog dialects, particularly those in the south, preserve the glottal stop found after consonants and before vowels. This has been lost in Standard Tagalog. For example, standard Tagalog ngayón (now, today), sinigáng (broth stew), gabí (night), matamís (sweet), are pronounced and written ngay-on, sinig-ang, gab-i, and matam-is in other dialects.
• In Teresian-Morong Tagalog, [ɾ] is usually preferred over [d]. For example, bundók, dagat, dingdíng, and isdâ become bunrók, ragat, ringríng, and isrâ, e.g. "sandók sa dingdíng" becoming "sanrók sa ringríng".
• In many southern dialects, the progressive aspect infix of -um- verbs is na-. For example, standard Tagalog kumakain (eating) is nákáin in Quezon and Batangas Tagalog. This is the butt of some jokes by other Tagalog speakers, for should a Southern Tagalog ask nákáin ka ba ng patíng? ("Do you eat shark?"), he would be understood as saying "Has a shark eaten you?" by speakers of the Manila Dialect.
• Some dialects have interjections which are considered a regional trademark. For example, the interjection ala e! usually identifies someone from Batangas as does hane?! in Rizal and Quezon provinces.

Perhaps the most divergent Tagalog dialects are those spoken in Marinduque.[35] Linguist Rosa Soberano identifies two dialects, western and eastern, with the former being closer to the Tagalog dialects spoken in the provinces of Batangas and Quezon.

One example is the verb conjugation paradigms. While some of the affixes are different, Marinduque also preserves the imperative affixes, also found in Visayan and Bikol languages, that have mostly disappeared from most Tagalog early 20th century; they have since merged with the infinitive.

Northern and central dialects form the basis for the national language.

Taglish and Englog are names given to a mix of English and Tagalog. The amount of English vs. Tagalog varies from the occasional use of English loan words to changing language in mid-sentence. Such code-switching is prevalent throughout the Philippines and in various languages of the Philippines other than Tagalog.

Code-mixing also entails the use of foreign words that are "Filipinized" by reforming them using Filipino rules, such as verb conjugations. Users typically use Filipino or English words, whichever comes to mind first or whichever is easier to use.

City-dwellers are more likely to do this.

The practice is common in television, radio, and print media as well. Advertisements from companies like Wells Fargo, Wal-Mart, Albertsons, McDonald's, and Western Union have contained Taglish.

Tagalog has ten simple vowels, five long and five short, and four diphthongs.[36] Before appearing in the area north of the Pasig river, Tagalog had three vowel qualities: /a/, /i/, and /u/. This was later expanded to five with the introduction of words from central and northern Philippines, such as the Kapampangan, Pangasinan and Ilocano languages, as well as Spanish words.

• /a/ an open central unrounded vowel roughly similar to English "father"; in the middle of a word, a near-open central vowel similar to Received Pronunciation "cup"; or an open front unrounded vowel similar to Received Pronunciation or California English "hat"
• /ɛ/ an open-mid front unrounded vowel similar to General American English "bed"
• /i/ a close front unrounded vowel similar to English "machine"
• /o/ a mid back rounded vowel similar to General American English "soul" or Philippine English "forty"
• /u/ a close back rounded vowel similar to English "flute"

Nevertheless, simplification of pairs [o ~ u] and [ɛ ~ i] is likely to take place, especially in some Tagalog as second language, remote location and working class registers.

The four diphthongs are /aj/, /uj/, /aw/, and /iw/. Long vowels are not written apart from pedagogical texts, where an acute accent is used: á é í ó ú.[36]

The table above shows all the possible realizations for each of the five vowel sounds depending on the speaker's origin or proficiency. The five general vowels are in bold.

Below is a chart of Tagalog consonants. All the stops are unaspirated. The velar nasal occurs in all positions including at the beginning of a word. Loanword variants using these phonemes are italicized inside the angle brackets.

• /k/ between vowels has a tendency to become [x] as in loch, German Bach, whereas in the initial position it has a tendency to become [kx], especially in the Manila dialect.
• Intervocalic /ɡ/ and /k/ tend to become [ɰ], as in Spanish agua, especially in the Manila dialect.
• /ɾ/ and /d/ were once allophones, and they still vary grammatically, with initial /d/ becoming intervocalic /ɾ/ in many words.[36]
• A glottal stop that occurs in pausa (before a pause) is omitted when it is in the middle of a phrase,[36] especially in the Metro Manila area. The vowel it follows is then lengthened. However, it is preserved in many other dialects.
• The /ɾ/ phoneme is an alveolar rhotic that has a free variation between a trill, a flap and an approximant ([r~ɾ~ɹ]).
• The /dʒ/ phoneme may become a consonant cluster [dd͡ʒ] in between vowels such as sadyâ [sadˈd͡ʒäʔ].

Glottal stop is not indicated.[36] Glottal stops are most likely to occur when:

• the word starts with a vowel, like aso (dog)
• the word includes a dash followed by a vowel, like mag-aral (study)
• the word has two vowels next to each other, like paano (how)
• the word starts with a prefix followed by a verb that starts with a vowel, like mag-aayos ([will] fix)

Stress is a distinctive feature in Tagalog. Primary stress occurs on either the final or the penultimate syllable of a word. Vowel lengthening accompanies primary or secondary stress except when stress occurs at the end of a word.

Tagalog words are often distinguished from one another by the position of the stress and/or the presence of a final glottal stop. In formal or academic settings, stress placement and the glottal stop are indicated by a diacritic (tuldík) above the final vowel.[37] The penultimate primary stress position (malumay) is the default stress type and so is left unwritten except in dictionaries.

Tagalog was written in an abugida (alphasyllabary) called Baybayin prior to the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines, in the 16th century. This particular writing system was composed of symbols representing three vowels and 14 consonants. Belonging to the Brahmic family of scripts, it shares similarities with the Old Kawi script of Java and is believed to be descended from the script used by the Bugis in Sulawesi.

Although it enjoyed a relatively high level of literacy, Baybayin gradually fell into disuse in favor of the Latin alphabet taught by the Spaniards during their rule.

There has been confusion of how to use Baybayin, which is actually an abugida, or an alphasyllabary, rather than an alphabet. Not every letter in the Latin alphabet is represented with one of those in the Baybayin alphasyllabary. Rather than letters being put together to make sounds as in Western languages, Baybayin uses symbols to represent syllables.

A "kudlit" resembling an apostrophe is used above or below a symbol to change the vowel sound after its consonant. If the kudlit is used above, the vowel is an "E" or "I" sound. If the kudlit is used below, the vowel is an "O" or "U" sound. A special kudlit was later added by Spanish missionaries in which a cross placed below the symbol to get rid of the vowel sound all together, leaving a consonant. Previously, the consonant without a following vowel was simply left out (for example, bundok being rendered as budo), forcing the reader to use context when reading such words.

Example:

Until the first half of the 20th century, Tagalog was widely written in a variety of ways based on Spanish orthography consisting of 32 letters called 'ABECEDARIO' (Spanish for "alphabet"):[41][42]

When the national language was based on Tagalog, grammarian Lope K. Santos introduced a new alphabet consisting of 20 letters called ABAKADA in school grammar books called balarilà:[43][44][45]

In 1987, the Department of Education, Culture and Sports issued a memo stating that the Philippine alphabet had changed from the Pilipino-Tagalog Abakada version to a new 28-letter alphabet[46][47] to make room for loans, especially family names from Spanish and English:[48]

The genitive marker ng and the plural marker mga (e.g. Iyan ang mga damit ko. (Those are my clothes)) are abbreviations that are pronounced nang [naŋ] and mangá [mɐˈŋa]. Ng, in most cases, roughly translates to "of" (ex. Siya ay kapatid ng nanay ko. She is the sibling of my mother) while nang usually means "when" or can describe how something is done or to what extent (equivalent to the suffix -ly in English adverbs), among other uses.

• Nang si Hudas ay nadulás.—When Judas slipped.
• Gumising siya nang maaga.—He woke up early.
• Gumalíng nang todo si Juan dahil nag-ensayo siya.—Juan greatly improved because he practiced.

In the first example, nang is used in lieu of the word noong (when; Noong si Hudas ay madulas). In the second, nang describes that the person woke up (gumising) early (maaga); gumising nang maaga. In the third, nang described up to what extent that Juan improved (gumaling), which is "greatly" (nang todo). In the latter two examples, the ligature na and its variants -ng and -g may also be used (Gumising na maaga/Maagang gumising; Gumaling na todo/Todong gumaling).

The longer nang may also have other uses, such as a ligature that joins a repeated word:

• Naghintáy sila nang naghintáy.—They kept on waiting" (a closer calque: "They were waiting and waiting.")

The words pô/hô and opò/ohò are traditionally used as polite iterations of the affirmative "oo" ("yes"). It is generally used when addressing elders or superiors such as bosses or teachers.

"Pô" and "opò" are specifically used to denote a high level of respect when addressing older persons of close affinity like parents, relatives, teachers and family friends. "Hô" and "ohò" are generally used to politely address older neighbours, strangers, public officials, bosses and nannies, and may suggest a distance in societal relationship and respect determined by the addressee's social rank and not their age. However, "pô" and "opò" can be used in any case in order to express an elevation of respect.

• Example: "Pakitapon naman pô/ho yung basura." ("Please throw away the trash.")

Used in the affirmative:

• Ex: "Gutóm ka na ba?" "Opò/Ohò". ("Are you hungry yet?" "Yes.")

Pô/Hô may also be used in negation.

• Ex: "Hindi ko pô/hô alam 'yan." ("I don't know that.")

In Tagalog, the Lord's Prayer is known by its incipit, Amá Namin (literally, "Our Father").

Amá namin, sumasalangit Ka,
Sambahín ang ngalan Mo.
Mapasaamin ang kaharián Mo.
Sundín ang loób Mo,
Dito sa lupà, gaya nang sa langit.
Bigyán Mo kamí ngayón ng aming kakanin sa araw-araw,
At patawarin Mo kamí sa aming mga salâ,
Para nang pagpápatawad namin,
Sa nagkakasalà sa amin;
At huwág Mo kamíng ipahintulot sa tuksó,
At iadyâ Mo kamí sa lahát ng masamâ.
[Sapagkát sa Inyó ang kaharián, at ang kapangyarihan,
At ang kaluwálhatian, ngayón, at magpakailanman.]
Amen.

This is Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Pángkalahatáng Pagpapahayag ng Karapatáng Pantao)

The numbers (mga bilang) in Tagalog language are of two sets. The first set consists of native Tagalog words and the other set are Spanish loanwords. (This may be compared to other East Asian languages, except with the second set of numbers borrowed from Spanish instead of Chinese.) For example, when a person refers to the number "seven", it can be translated into Tagalog as "pito" or "siyete" (Spanish: siete).

Months and days in Tagalog are also localised forms of Spanish months and days. "Month" in Tagalog is buwán (also the word for moon) and "day" is araw (the word also means sun). Unlike Spanish, however, months and days in Tagalog are always capitalised.

Time expressions in Tagalog are also Tagalized forms of the corresponding Spanish. "Time" in Tagalog is panahon, or more commonly oras. Unlike Spanish and English, times in Tagalog are capitalized whenever they appear in a sentence.

Ang hindî marunong lumingón sa pinánggalingan ay hindî makaráratíng sa paroroonan. (José Rizal)
One who knows not how to look back from whence he came, will never get to where he is going.

Unang kagat, tinapay pa rin. It means :"First bite, still bread." or "All fluff no substance."

Tao ka nang humarap, bilang tao kitang haharapin.
(A proverb in Southern Tagalog that made people aware the significance of sincerity in Tagalog communities. It says, "As a human you reach me, I treat you as a human and never act as a traitor.")

Hulí man daw (raw) at magalíng, nakáhahábol pa rin.
If one is behind but capable, one will still be able to catch up.

Magbirô ka na sa lasíng, huwág lang sa bagong gising.
Make fun of someone drunk, if you must, but never one who has just awakened.

Aanhín pa ang damó kung patáy na ang kabayo?
What use is the grass if the horse is already dead?

Ang sakít ng kalingkingan, ramdám ng buóng katawán.
The pain in the pinkie is felt by the whole body.
(In a group, if one goes down, the rest follow.)

Nasa hulí ang pagsisisi.
Regret is always in the end.

Pagkáhabà-habà man ng prusisyón, sa simbahan pa rin ang tulóy.
The procession may stretch on and on, but it still ends up at the church.
(In romance: refers to how certain people are destined to be married. In general: refers to how some things are inevitable, no matter how long you try to postpone it.)

Kung 'dî mádaán sa santóng dasalan, daanin sa santóng paspasan.
If it cannot be got through holy prayer, get it through blessed force.
(In romance and courting: santóng paspasan literally means 'holy speeding' and is a euphemism for sexual intercourse. It refers to the two styles of courting by Filipino boys: one is the traditional, protracted, restrained manner favored by older generations, which often featured serenades and manual labor for the girl's family; the other is upfront seduction, which may lead to a slap on the face or a pregnancy out of wedlock. The second conclusion is known as pikot or what Western cultures would call a 'shotgun marriage'. This proverb is also applied in terms of diplomacy and negotiation.)