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The Diversity of the Philippine Population

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The Philippine Archipelago

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Abstract

A country of many islands, the Philippines is also a country of many languages. The Tagalog language of Manila has been chosen as the base of the national Pilipino language, even if Cebuano counts as many speakers. The languages of the Philippines have common grammatical structures, but wide differences in vocabulary. Contrary to Latin America where Spanish and Portuguese became the dominant languages, Spanish did not dominate the local languages, since colonial priests preferred to learn local languages rather than teaching Spanish to their flocks. English, as the second colonial language, is spoken much more, since the Americans educated Filipinos in English as part of their “benevolent assimilation” policy. Today, there is debate about the role to give to English, a colonial language, in the educational system, while English is a definite asset for the Philippines in the global economy. The Philippine diversity is also ethnic, with many tribes of “indigenous people”, mostly located in remote hilly areas. Legislation tend today to protect their customs and lifestyles, even if it seems too late for many of them. Other minority groups include the Chinese and Koreans, who play an important role in the country’s economic life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ethnologue.com/country/PH.

  2. 2.

    The term “Malayo-polynesian” was first used by linguist Wilhelm Von Humboldt in 1836 as he tried to establish a link between Indonesian and Polynesian languages. In 1876, Friedrich Müller coined the expression “Austronesian” which is now more widely used. Malayo-Polynesian tongues make up three quarters of all Austronesian languages. Almost all local languages of the Philippines belong to this grouping, except for Chavacano dialects, which are derived from Spanish: 700,000 speakers of Zamboangueño (Chabacano de Zamboanga ) and 200,000 of Caviteño (Chabacano de Cavite ) (Frake 1971).

  3. 3.

    Mabait ang bata, the child is nice. Mababait ang mga bata, the children are nice. There is also a pattern of repeating nouns to indicate a large quantity, for example when talking about sari-sari stores or ukay-ukay shops, or the halo-halo dessert.

  4. 4.

    In the same way, Indonesia would build “bahasa indonesia” from Javanese after 1945, with the major difference that Javanese was the mother tongue of a large majority of Indonesians, which is not the case of Tagalog in the Philippines.

  5. 5.

    The Hong Kong example, where the decling level of English speaking since the 1997 Chinese takeover is seen as a danger for the future prosperity of the territory, is closely watched in the Philippines.

  6. 6.

    At one time the expression “tribal groups” was employed by lowland Filipinos in a pejorative sense, but in recent years it came to be used with pride by natives in the mountain region as a positive expression of their ethnic identity.

  7. 7.

    The pejorative word “Igorot” has a disputed etymology. For some authors, it comes from the old Tagalog “I-golot” (people from the mountain range). For others, it comes from the Ilocano word “gerret” which means to “cut off” or to “slice” (the head). It refers to the “unhispanised” and “tribal” people of the Cordillera in Northern Luzon who, until the first three decades of the 20th century, still widely practiced headhunting. Because of its initial association with relentless killings and cutting of heads, the word today still conjures up images of “savageness” and “primitiveness” to the general public. However, the concerned tribes have adopted it today as a symbol of their identity. (Scott 1962; Finin 2006; McKay 2006).

  8. 8.

    Not to be confused with the Andaman Islands Negritos, which appear to have little in common with Philippine Negritos except for size and skin color (Endicott 2013; Stock 2013).

  9. 9.

    Modeled after the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Barrows 1901, Rodriguez 2010).

  10. 10.

    An agency to implement programs for the Filipino Muslims, which later became the Ministry of Muslim Affairs.

  11. 11.

    Etymologically, it comes from the hokkien word sengli (sheng-li in mandarin), meaning “business”.

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    Yves Boquet

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Boquet, Y. (2017). The Diversity of the Philippine Population. In: The Philippine Archipelago. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51926-5_7

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