Search results for "Tagalog"

The Diversity of the Philippine Population

2017

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 a…