Tagalog ( ;According to the OED and Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary ; Baybayin: ) is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by the ethnic Tagalog people, who make up a quarter of the population of the Philippines, and as a second language by the majority. Its standardized and codified form, Filipino, is the national language of the Philippines, and is one language of the nation's two official languages, alongside English.
Tagalog, like other Austronesian languages, commonly uses verb-subject-object order, but can also use subject-verb-object order. Tagalog follows the trigger system of morphosyntactic alignment that is common among Philippine 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.
Tagalog is closely related to other Philippine languages, such as the Bikol languages, the Bisayan languages, Ilocano, Kapampangan, and Pangasinan, and more distantly to other Austronesian languages, such as the Formosan languages of Taiwan, Indonesian, Malay, Hawaiian, Māori, Malagasy, and many more.
Classification Tagalog is a Central Philippine language within the Austronesian language family. Being Malayo-Polynesian, it is related to other Austronesian languages, such as Malagasy, Javanese, Indonesian, Malay, Tetum (of Timor), and Yami (of Taiwan). It is closely related to the languages spoken in the Bicol Region and the Visayas islands, such as the Bikol group and the Visayan group, including Waray, Hiligaynon and Cebuano.
Tagalog differs from other Central Philippine languages with its treatment of the Proto-Philippine schwa vowel . In most Bikol and Visayan languages, this sound merged with and . In Tagalog, it has merged with . For example, Proto-Philippine (adhere, stick) is Tagalog and Visayan and Bikol .
Proto-Philippine , , and merged with but is between vowels. Proto-Philippine (name) and (kiss) became Tagalog and . Adjacent to an affix, however, it becomes instead: (paid) → (to pay).
History
The word Tagalog is possibly derived from the endonym taga-ilog ("river dweller"), composed of tagá- ("native of" or "from") and ilog ("river"), or alternatively, taga-alog deriving from alog ("pool of water in the lowlands"; "rice or vegetable plantation"). Linguists such as David Zorc and Robert Blust speculate that the Tagalogs and other Central Philippine ethno-linguistic groups originated in Northeastern Mindanao or the Eastern Visayas.
Possible words of Old Tagalog origin are attested in the Laguna Copperplate Inscription from the tenth century, which is largely written in Old Malay. The first known complete book to be written in Tagalog is the Doctrina Christiana (Christian Doctrine), printed in 1593. The Doctrina was written in Spanish and two transcriptions of Tagalog; one in the ancient, then-current Baybayin script and the other in an early Spanish attempt at a Latin orthography for the language.
Throughout the 333 years of Spanish rule, various grammars and dictionaries were written by Spanish clergymen. In 1610, the Dominican priest Francisco Blancas de San José published the Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala (which was subsequently revised with two editions in 1752 and 1832) in Bataan. In 1613, the Franciscan priest Pedro de San Buenaventura published the first Tagalog dictionary, his Vocabulario de la lengua tagala in Pila, Laguna.
The first substantial dictionary of the Tagalog language was written by the Czech Jesuit missionary Pablo Clain in the beginning of the 18th century. Clain spoke Tagalog and used it actively in several of his books. He prepared the dictionary, which he later passed over to Francisco Jansens and José Hernandez. Further compilation of his substantial work was prepared by P. Juan de Noceda and P. Pedro de Sanlucar and published as Vocabulario de la lengua tagala in Manila in 1754 and then repeatedly reedited, with the last edition being in 2013 in Manila.
Among others, Arte de la lengua tagala y manual tagalog para la administración de los Santos Sacramentos (1850) in addition to early studies of the language.
The indigenous poet Francisco Balagtas (1788–1862) is known as the foremost Tagalog writer, his most notable work being the 19th-century epic Florante at Laura.
Official status
Tagalog was declared the official language by the first revolutionary constitution in the Philippines, the Constitution of Biak-na-Bato in 1897.
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. 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. 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. In 1939, President Quezon designated the proposed Tagalog-based national language as the (national language). Quezon himself was born and raised in Baler, Aurora, which is a native Tagalog-speaking area.
Upon the country gaining independence on July 4, 1946, Commonwealth Act No. 570, which was approved in June 7, 1940, officially declared it an official language under the name, Filipino.
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, Wikang Pambansang Pilipino was institutionally further renamed as Pilipino. Along with English, the national language has had official status under the 1973 constitution (as "Pilipino") and the 1987 constitution (as "Filipino").
Controversy The selection of the Philippine national language in 1937 based on Tagalog generated much geopolitical and linguistic controversy.
Members of the non-Tagalog speaking community, mainly people who speak the Cebuano and Ilocano languages, regarded the decision as a cultural imposition that ignored their languages.
To reduce such tensions between the regions and cultivate a feeling of unity, the government chose to adopt a policy of not referring to regions. President Manuel L. Quezon signed Executive Order No. 263 in 1939, where he designated the language as the Wikang Pambansâ ("National Language").
Twenty years later, in 1959, it was renamed by then Secretary of Education, José E. 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.
The national language issue was revived once more during the 1971 Constitutional Convention. The majority of the delegates were in favor of scrapping the idea of a "national language" altogether. 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. 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. Filipino and Tagalog are varieties of the same language, sharing a big bulk of common lexical items and having the same grammar.
Use in education Upon the issuance of Executive Order No. 134, Tagalog was declared as basis of the National Language. On April 12, 1940, Executive Order No. 263 was issued ordering the teaching of the national language in all public and private schools in the country.
Article XIV, Section 6 of the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines specifies, in part:
Under Section 7, however:
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. After pilot tests in selected schools, the MLE program was implemented nationwide from School Year (SY) 2012–2013.
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.Philippine Census, 2000. Table 11. Household Population by Ethnicity, Sex and Region: 2000
Geographic distribution In the Philippines
According to the 2020 census, 109 million people were living in the Philippines. The vast majority have some basic level of understanding of Filipino. The Tagalog homeland, Katagalugan, covers much of the central to southern parts of the island Luzon — particularly in Aurora, Bataan, Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Metro Manila, Nueva Ecija, Quezon, and Rizal. Tagalog is also spoken natively by inhabitants living on the islands of Marinduque and Mindoro, as well as Palawan to a lesser extent. Significant minorities of Filipino speakers are found in the other Central Luzon provinces of Pampanga and Tarlac, Camarines Norte and Camarines Sur in Bicol Region, the Cordillera city of Baguio, southeast Pangasinan in Ilocos Region, and various parts of Mindanao especially in the island's urban areas. Filipino is also the predominant language of Cotabato City in Mindanao, making it the only place outside of Luzon with a Filipino-speaking majority. It is also the main lingua franca in Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
According to the 2000 Philippine Census, approximately 96% of the household population who were able to attend school could speak Filipino; and about 28% of the total population spoke it natively.
The following regions and provinces of the Philippines are majority Tagalog-speaking, overlapping with Filipino-speaking (from north to south): Cordillera Administrative Region Baguio (While the regional language Ilocano and indigenous languages Ibaloi and Kankanaey are the native languages of Baguio, a provincial dialect of Filipino, is the majority language.) Central Luzon Region Aurora Bataan Bulacan Nueva Ecija Zambales Metro Manila (National Capital Region) Southern Luzon Southern Tagalog (Calabarzon and Mimaropa) Batangas Cavite Laguna Rizal Quezon Marinduque Occidental Mindoro Oriental Mindoro Romblon (While Romblomanon, Onhan, and Asi are the native languages of the province, a provincial dialect of Filipino, is the lingua franca between the various language groups.) Palawan (Historically a non-Tagalog-speaking province, waves of cross-migration from various other regions, especially Calabarzon, has resulted in a dialect of Filipino, becoming the main spoken language.) Bicol Region (While the Bikol languages have traditionally been the majority languages in the following provinces, heavy Tagalog influence and migration has resulted in its significant presence in these provinces and in many communities, Tagalog succeeded it as the majority language.) Camarines Norte Camarines Sur Bangsamoro