The first dictionary of Tagalog, published as the Vocabulario de la lengua tagala, was written by the Franciscan Pedro de San Buenaventura, and published in 1613 by the 'Father of Filipino Printing' Tomás Pinpin in Pila, Laguna. Manila was made capital of the new colony both because of fears of raids from the Portuguese and the Dutch, and because of its strategic location. The eventual capital established by Spain in the Philippines was Manila, situated in a Tagalog-speaking region, after the conquest of Manila from both the Muslim communities of Rajah Sulayman and Rajah Matanda and the Hindu-Buddhist Kingdom of Tondo ruled by Lakan Dula. There was no single common language across every cultural group in the Philippine archipelago when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, although chroniclers of the time noted that the kings or chiefs of small polities normally spoke five languages.Ī Spanish exploratory mission under Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in 1521, and Spanish colonization of the islands followed. The common Malayo-Polynesian language split into different languages and these languages borrowed words from other languages such as Hokkien, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Arabic. Many of these languages descend from a common Malayo-Polynesian language due to the Austronesian migration from Taiwan however, there are languages brought by the indigenous people of the Philippines. The Philippines is a multilingual state with 184 living languages originating and spoken by various ethno-linguistic groups. It is not a tonal language and can be considered a pitch-accent language and a syllable-timed language.

It is an agglutinative language but can also display inflection. Filipino follows the trigger system of morphosyntactic alignment that is also common among Austronesian languages. įilipino, like other Austronesian languages, commonly uses verb-subject-object order, but can also use subject-verb-object order as well. Filipino is only used as a tertiary language in the Philippine public sphere. The 1987 Constitution mandates that Filipino be further enriched and developed by the other languages of the Philippines.

It is a standardized variety of Tagalog based on the native dialect, spoken and written, in Metro Manila, the National Capital Region, and in other urban centers of the archipelago. It is the national language ( Wikang pambansa / Pambansang wika) of the Philippines, and one of the two official languages of the country, with English. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.įilipino ( English: / ˌ f ɪ l ɪ ˈ p iː n oʊ/ ( listen) Wikang Filipino, ) is a language under the Austronesian language family. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Countries where it is spoken by minor communities

Filipino alphabet abakada