ABSTRACT
The Philippines is made up of a pluralistic blend of indigenous cultures with a predominant Malay base but also influenced heavily by the East due to early trade with the Chinese, Indians and Arabs and by the West due to 333 years of Spanish colonisation and Christianisation and 45 years of American rule. It has 25 major indigenous minority groups, scattered throughout its thousands of islands, which together have more than a hundred ethno-linguistic and sub-dialect groups, as well as ethnic groups of Chinese and Indian ancestry.1 With a long tradition of foreign borrowings and added to that, the well-known traditional hospitality and Christian tradition of Filipinos, an integration of East and West and other cultures is very much evident.
