

TagalogĪre Filipino and Tagalog more or less the same language? Almost, but not quite. You’ll mostly encounter English in government, newspapers and magazines. territory between the years of 18.įilipino is the primary language used in school and media, and it’s also the lingua franca that unites the nation’s disparate linguistic communities. Filipino is the national language, and the official status of English is a holdover from its time as a U.S. The two official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and English. What Language Is Spoken In The Philippines? Official Languages Still, there are official and national languages to speak of, as well as several other tongues that are more widely spoken throughout the nation. In fact, the Philippines has a whole month in August to celebrate this fact (called Buwan ng Wika, or Language Month). This data visualization tool will probably help you get a better grasp of how this looks in practice, but to give you an idea, there’s a 76 percent to 84 percent chance that any two random people in the Philippines grew up speaking a different language, which makes this nation more linguistically diverse than at least 190 other countries. Even though most of them are uninhabited, that still leaves plenty of opportunity for linguistic diversity to flourish. This sounds like a lot until you consider the fact that the Philippines consist of 7,641 individual islands. There are 183 living languages currently spoken in the Philippines, the vast majority of which are indigenous tongues. There’s no easy way to say what language is spoken in the Philippines, unless you’re willing to name and enumerate nearly 200 of them.
