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Tagalog is an Austronesian language originally spoken in the vicinity of the capital of the Philippines, Manila, but among the approximately one hundred languages of the country it has the oldest and most extensive literature, dating from the sixteenth century. It eventually was taken as the basis of the national language, Filipino (also written as Pilipino), in 1937. As a spoken mother-tongue, Tagalog moved out from the Manila area into the rest of the Philippines and also followed emigrants to the US and elsewhere. In the 1990 census, Tagalog was listed as their first language by about a quarter of the population of the Philippines. If one includes second language speakers and speakers outside the Philippines (including substantial populations in the US), the total comes to almost sixty million. In terms of grammar, Tagalog and Filipino are very similar, but the Filipino alphabet has twenty-eight letters compared to Tagalog’s twenty and is better able to integrate loanwords. The University of Michigan switched from teaching Tagalog to Filipino in 1998. Tagalog had its own script before the Spanish conquest, but it and Filipino have long been written with alphabets making use of Roman letters. The Philippines were ruled first by the Spanish and then by the US (from 1898 to 1946), and English has continued to be taught widely. Consequently, both Spanish and English have had a pervasive influence on Tagalog and Filipino, which contain many loanwords from these two languages.
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