dearmanila: Tagalog: What Is That?

TAGALOG (pronounced TUGGA-log) is a big word for the Filipinos. It can mean two things:

1. A member of a people native to the Philippines and inhabiting Manila and its adjacent provinces.
2. The basis of the Filipino national language. ("Tagalog" is a dialect; "Filipino" is our national language)

With a population of over 90 million, it is said that there are as many as 300 languages and dialects in these islands which belong to the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages. One of the factors that complicate the language situation in the Philippines is diversity (7,107 islands!) Linguists say there are 75 to 150 native languages spoken by Filipinos. The latest estimate is 109 languages. Although these languages are in some ways grammatically and lexically similar, they are mutually unintelligible.

In 1571, the Spaniards found the people in Manila and other places writing on bamboo and specially prepared palm leaves using knives and styli. They were using the ancient Tagalog script which had 17 basic symbols, three of which were the vowels a, i, and u. Each basic consonantal symbol had the inherent a sound: ka, ga, nga, ta, da, na, pa, ba, ma, ya, la, wa, sa, and ha.

The Tagalog script was a syllabary, which means that each symbol represents a complete syllable. This is in contrast to the Latin alphabet where each symbol represents a phoneme, the smallest unit of the sound of speech. It is this distinction that makes it difficult for many people steeped in alphabetic systems to understand the correct way of using the Tagalog script.

Filipino (Tagalog) has been influenced, principally in vocabulary by the languages with which they have come into contact: Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, English, and Spanish. It is closest to Spanish, but not quite. Although that might confusing, there are some fun websites that can help:

Tagalog Lang

http://tagaloglang.com/

Learning Tagalog
https://learningtagalog.com/

And of course, the Rosetta Stone for Filipino.

The language is very rich and beautiful. I will share poems, soon. In the meantime, here are some fun tagalog phrases that might be useful for you.

I love you = Mahal kita

How are you? = Kamusta?

Goodbye! = Paalam!

Beautiful = Maganda

Hello! = Mabuhay!