Language
The most common languages spoken in the Philippines today are English and Filipino, which is based on Tagalog. Spanish was an official language of the country until the change of government in 1987, which led to Spanish being dropped as an official language for political reasons. The Americans embarked on a policy of dehispanicisation and urged the Filipino government to chose Tagalog and English as the official languages. There are a minority of people who still speak Spanish in public; these people are mostly of Hispanic origin. However, the government has reintroduced the teaching of Spanish into the state education system.
The Spanish spoken in the Philippines today has a great affinity with Mexican Spanish. Filipino Spanish contains many Mexican Spanish loanwords of Nahuatl origin which were first incorporated into Mexican Spanish, and which do not exist in European Spanish. Examples include nanay (nantl), tatay (tatle), bayabas, abokado (avocado), papaya, sayote, zapote, and palengke.
Various Filipino languages have significantly assimilated aspects of the Spanish language, and contain thousands of loanwords. Numerous words, and some grammatical concepts of the Spanish vocabulary, are used in Chavacano, Cebuano, Tagalog, Bicolano, and Ilocano.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Influence On Filipino Culture
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)