Concept

Filipino language

Summary
Filipino (pronˌfɪlɪˈpiːnoʊ; Wikang Filipino, ˈwiːkɐŋ ˌfiːliˈpiːno) is a language under the Austronesian language family. It is the national language (Wikang pambansa / Pambansang wika) of the Philippines, and one of the two official languages of the country, with English. It is a standardized variety of Tagalog based on the native dialect, spoken and written, in Metro Manila, the National Capital Region, and in other urban centers of the archipelago. The 1987 Constitution mandates that Filipino be further enriched and developed by the other languages of the Philippines. Filipino is only used as a tertiary language in the Philippine public sphere. Filipino, like other Austronesian languages, commonly uses verb-subject-object order, but can also use subject-verb-object order as well. Filipino follows the trigger system of morphosyntactic alignment that is also common among Austronesian languages. It has head-initial directionality. It is an agglutinative language but can also display inflection. It is not a tonal language and can be considered a pitch-accent language and a syllable-timed language. It has nine basic parts of speech. The Philippines is a multilingual state with 184 living languages originating and spoken by various ethno-linguistic groups. Many of these languages descend from a common Malayo-Polynesian language due to the Austronesian migration from Taiwan; however, there are languages brought by the indigenous people of the Philippines. The common Malayo-Polynesian language split into different languages and these languages borrowed words from other languages such as Hokkien, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Arabic. There was no single common language across every cultural group in the Philippine archipelago when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, although chroniclers of the time noted that the kings or chiefs of small polities normally spoke five languages. A Spanish exploratory mission under Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in 1521, and Spanish colonization of the islands followed.
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