Tagalog (Filipino)

Where it’s spoken

Tagalog is the mother tongue of about 28 million people in the central Philippines, especially Metro Manila, Bulacan, Batangas, and surrounding provinces. Its standardized form, Filipino, is the national language and a co-official language alongside English. As a second language, Filipino is spoken by most of the country’s 110 million people. Major Filipino diaspora communities live in the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Canada, and Australia.

What it sounds like

Tagalog has a clean 5-vowel system and 23 consonants. It features verb conjugations marked by focus (or “voice”) — Actor Focus, Object Focus, Locative Focus, etc. — rather than by tense alone. Word order is typically verb-initial. Stress is unpredictable and can distinguish word meaning.

How it’s written

Tagalog/Filipino uses the Latin alphabet of 28 letters (the basic 26 plus ñ and ng). Spelling is largely phonemic, with Spanish-era borrowings and modern English loans retaining elements of their original spelling. The pre-colonial Baybayin script has experienced cultural revival but is not in everyday use.

History

Tagalog absorbed substantial Spanish vocabulary during 333 years of colonial rule and then American English vocabulary in the 20th century. Filipino was officially adopted as the national language in 1937 and updated in subsequent constitutions.