Filipino-language television stations

Filipino (; , ) is an Austronesian language. It is the national language ( / ) of the Philippines, and one of the two official languages of the country, with English. 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. The 1987 Constitution mandates that Filipino be further enriched and developed by the other languages of the Philippines. Filipino is only used as a tertiary language in the Philippine public sphere.

Filipino, like other Austronesian languages, commonly uses verb-subject-object order, but can also use subject-verb-object order as well. Filipino follows the trigger system of morphosyntactic alignment that is also common among Austronesian 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.

Background

The Philippines is a multilingual state with 184 living languages originating and spoken by various ethno-linguistic groups. 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 common Malayo-Polynesian language split into different languages and these languages borrowed words from other languages such as Hokkien, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Arabic. 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.

A Spanish exploratory mission under Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in 1521, and Spanish colonization of the islands followed. 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. 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 first dictionary of Tagalog, published as the , was written by the Franciscan Pedro de San Buenaventura, and published in 1613 by the "Father of Filipino Printing" Tomás Pinpin in Pila, Laguna. A latter book of the same name was written by Czech Jesuit missionary Paul Klein (known locally as Pablo Clain) at the beginning of the 18th century. Klein spoke Tagalog and used it actively in several of his books. He wrote a dictionary, which he later passed to Francisco Jansens and José Hernández. Further compilation of his substantial work was prepared by Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlúcar and published as ' in Manila in 1754 and then repeatedly re-edited, with the latest edition being published in 2013 in Manila.

Spanish served in an official capacity as language of the government during the Spanish colonial period. During the American colonial period, English became an additional official language of the Philippines alongside Spanish; however, the number of speakers of Spanish steadily decreased.

Designation as the national language

While Spanish and English were considered "official languages" during the American colonial period, there existed no "national language" initially. Article XIII, section 3 of the 1935 constitution establishing the Commonwealth of the Philippines provided that:

On November 13, 1936, the first National Assembly of the Philippine Commonwealth approved Commonwealth Act No. 184; creating the Institute of National Language (later the Surián ng Wikang Pambansâ or SWP) and tasking it with making a study and survey of each existing native language, hoping to choose which was to be the base for a standardized national language. Later, President Manuel L. Quezon later appointed representatives for each major regional language to form the NLI. Led by Jaime C. De Veyra, who sat as the chair of the Institute and as the representative of Samar-Leyte-Visayans, the Institute's members were composed of Santiago A. Fonacier (representing the Ilokano-speaking regions),