Filipino People

The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 104 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines.

There are around 180 languages spoken in the Philippines, most of them belonging to the Austronesian language family, with Tagalog and Cebuano having the greatest number of native speakers. The official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and English and most Filipinos are bilingual or trilingual.

Most Filipinos refer to themselves colloquially as "Pinoy" (feminine: "Pinay"), which is a slang word formed by taking the last four letters of "Pilipino" and adding the diminutive suffix "-y". The lack of the letter "F" in the pre-1987 Philippine alphabet, Abakada, had caused the letter "F" to be substituted with "P". This is why, when the 28-letter modern Filipino alphabet was made official in 1987, the name Filipino was preferred over Pilipino. The name Filipino was chosen by the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, who named the islands "las Islas Filipinas" ("the Philippine Islands") after Philip II of Spain.

In colloquial speech, English language words borrowed from the Filipino language are inflected for gender. It is quite unnatural, for example, for women to call themselves Filipino in daily conversation and they will generally refer to themselves instead as Filipina. Also, adjectives that have to do with women (e.g. "Filipina beauty") are modified to use the feminine form. In legal documents such as bank accounts and passports, however, both genders are referred to as Filipino.

The Philippines were a Spanish colony for over 300 years, leaving Filipino culture and people semi-Hispanicized. About 90% of the Filipino population identifies as Roman Catholic and many have Spanish surnames. As the Philippine Statistics Department does not account for the racial background or ancestry of an individual, the official percentage of Filipinos with Spanish ancestry is unknown. A study conducted by Stanford University based on DNA samples extrapolated that around 3.6% of Filipinos have European genetic ancestries.