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:
“Which I wish to remark—
And my language is plain—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar:
Which the same I would rise to explain.”
—Bret Harte (1836–1902)
“There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)