ABSTRACT
Tagalog is a member of the Central Philippine subgroup of Philippine languages, forming part of the Western-Malayo-Polynesian set of Austronesian languages. It belongs in a subgroup with Bikol, Bisayan and Mansakan languages and was originally probably native to the eastern Visayas or northeast Mindanao in the Central Philippines (Zorc 1993). By the time the Spanish arrived in the Philippines (1521), Tagalog speakers had migrated north into the southern part of the island of Luzon in the Philippines, with Tagalog becoming the major language spoken in Manila and surrounding provinces; it has in recent years spread as a second language over virtually the entire Philippine archipelago. Thus, while only about a quarter of the population of the Philippines were Tagalog-speaking in 1940, in 1970 approximately half of the population were, and today it is estimated that well over 90 per cent of the 80 million total population of the Philippines is either a first-or second-language speaker of the language. Tagalog was selected in 1937 as the national language of the Philippines, and was
established as such in the 1987 Constitution of the country. Under the name of Filipino, Tagalog is now taught in schools throughout the Philippines. The spread of the language has also been favoured by urbanisation – Tagalog is native to the largest city of the Philippines, Manila, and it is used as a lingua franca in many cities with mixed populations – as well as by its prominence in the mass media. The dialect of Tagalog which is considered standard and which underlies Filipino is
the educated dialect of Manila. Other important regional dialects are those of Bataan, Batangas, Bulacan, Tanay-Paete and Tayabas. The lexicon of educated Manila Tagalog contains many borrowings from Spanish and English, the former reflecting over three centuries of colonial domination of the Philippines by Spain, the latter reflecting the period of American hegemony (1898-1946), as well as the current status of English as one of the languages (along with Filipino) of higher education in the Philippines and a lingua franca second in importance only to Filipino itself. Spanish and English have
2, below), but on the syntax and morphology. (See Section 4, however, for some instances of borrowed Spanish gender distinctions.)
Tagalog phonology has been significantly affected by the incorporation into the language of many loanwords from Spanish, English and other languages. One effect of this incorporation has been an expansion of the phonemic inventory of the language, an expansion that has influenced both the vowel and the consonant systems. Contemporary Tagalog has the five vowel phonemes shown in Table 49.1.
