So someone asked me why people from the Philippines are called Filipinos and not Philipinos. I figured, I should probably know the answer to that so I did research. (Like anyone else would do at midnight on a Thursday…) I found the following best answer from my searching. Just in case you don’t know, Tagalog is one of 3 major dialects spoken in the Philippines and is most widely used.
…it’s Spanish that’s to blame. When the Philippines was a Spanish colony, they called it the ‘Islas Filipinas’. The Americans changed it to the English Philippine Islands or Philippines, but the Spanish term for one of the people from there stuck. Tagalog doesn’t have an f except in borrowed words (similarly with j in Welsh), so the name became Pilipinas when the independent nation really got going and adopted the formerly regional Tagalog as a national language. However, there are plans (and have been since 1973) to create a new national language based on most of the major languages spoken there. This sort of thing doesn’t normally work, so the name chosen for the new language will probably get transferred to Tagalog. Guess what it is? Filipino.
So there you have it. A pondered, answered, and somewhat interesting note about myself other than “I’m Asian… I mean Pacific Islander… I mean Asian… Spanish?… Whatever stop talking about my people!”
18/09/2008 at 1:55 am Permalink
Is Tagalog a dialect of Spanish?
In this dialect, do they pronounce Cruz as “Cr-uh-z”? Cause the should…