Introduction to Filipino
From Wikiversity
Filipino is a language spoken by over 64 million people in the Philippines, an archipelago located in Southeast Asia. This is one of the many languages of the Malayo Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, and such, it bears much similarity to the other languages of the Philippines and to a more limited extent Bahasa Indonesia and Malaysia.
[edit] Speakers
The Philippines is the only country where Filipino is an official language, though there are many speakers of Filipino in other countries. It is a significant household language in such countries as Australia, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.
[edit] Writing
Filipino presently uses the Roman script. The Filipino alphabet has 28 letters: 26 from English and one uniquely from Spanish ( ñ ). The 16th letter is ng, which is theoretically counted as only one letter.
[edit] Filipino and Tagalog
Filipino, being the national language of the Philippines, was designed to be an amalgamation of the different languages of the Philippine islands. The basis of the Filipino language is Tagalog, a Philippine language spoken by the people of Central and Southern Luzon. It was chosen mostly because it was the American Commonwealth government in Manila which pushed for a national language to counter what nationalists perceived as Americanization of Philippine culture. Manuel L. Quezon, a Tagalog, was head of the Commonwealth government from 1935 to his death in 1944. One of the nationalistic movements pushed by the Tagalogs, together with other groups, was a language movement that declared Filipino as the national language. Lope K. Santos developed his Balarila (grammar) for the Tagalog language in the first decade of the 20th century, and the movers in Philippine government and society adopted Tagalog as basis for the new language, with an intention to change the lexicon and possibly the syntax to accomodate other ethnic groups. Tagalog is the main grammatical and lexical basis for the Filipino language, although words from other Philippine languages are included. Because of its similarity or resemblance to Tagalog, some people use the word Tagalog in describing the Filipino language. This has resulted in considerable resentment by other dominant Philippine groups, who continue to use their own languages instead of Filipino in their formal and informal transactions. Such resentment has led to the government and the eduactional leaders of the country resorting to the increased use of English as a unifying language for the Philippines, instead of pushing for the use of Tagalog-based Filipino.
The Sentro ng Wikang Filipino (SWF) has started to increase the vocabulary for Filipino, first adding words from other Philippine languages from a Tagalog base, and then adding words from English and other Indo-European languages. The goal of SWF seems to create a language that will express scholastic as well as ordinary ideas, thoughts and nuances that are common to Filipinos of whatever ethnic group.
