Tagalog: A History of the Language of the Philippines

There are more than 50 million speakers of Tagalog in the

Philippines, mostly in the southern parts of Luzon, the
archipelago’s largest island. Other dialects spoken in the
Philippines include Cebuano, Ilokano, Waray-Waray,
Hiligaynon, Pangasinan, Bikol, Maranao, Maguindanao,
Tausug, and Kapampangan, but the official language, Filipino, is
based on Tagalog. There are also significant numbers of
Tagalog-speaking communities in other countries, with the
largest in the United States where it ranks as the sixth most-
spoken language.
Derived from “Taga-ilog,” which literally means “from the
river,” Tagalog is an Austronesian language belonging to the
Malayo-Polynesian subfamily, with outside influences from
Malay and Chinese, and later from both Spanish and American
English through four centuries of colonial rule. This influence is
seen in Tagalog words and their spelling.
Tagalog had its own writing system based on an ancient script
called the Baybayin that uses a syllabic alphabet, which the
Spanish colonialists romanized. Even the modern alphabet has
been changed several times to incorporate foreign sounds from
both Spanish and English.
There are thousands of loan words in Tagalog, particularly from
Spanish, and the use of “Taglish,” the mixing of Tagalog and
English, is common, especially in urban areas. In both spoken
and written Tagalog, English words (sometimes spelled
according to their Tagalog pronunciation, oftentimes not) are
used alongside words of Spanish origin. Some of these borrowed
words do have equivalent forms in Tagalog but their use is
reserved for formal or literary language. But many of these loan
words do not have Tagalog counterparts, especially those that
refer to objects or concepts that did not exist in the country prior
to the arrival of Westerners.
However, in spite of all the foreign borrowings in Tagalog, the
richness of the language remains intact. Foreign words are not
absorbed into the language without being subjected to the
complexity of Tagalog’s system of affixes—or syllables or
letters fixed within a word—which permits any noun to be
turned into a verb and vice versa. If language is the collective
product of the genius of a people, as linguist Wilhelm Humboldt
put it, affixation is the genius of Tagalog and its challenge as
well.
Ready to dive into learning Tagalog? You can start right away
with our online course, or if you prefer to learn with a book,
check out our Spoken World Tagalog course here.