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This "Buwan Ng Wika", I'm Trying to Learn More About the Southeast Asian Influence Found in Various Filipino Languages

Knowing the history of the Philippines means tracing back its ancestors. I saw this video on Youtube where I did manage to do some lucky guesses. When I heard of Tealive's Bryan Loo of Loob Holdings, I wasn't surprised that loob in Malaysian still means inside. This video is of a Filipino woman (Tagalog) and a Malaysian man speaking to each other. If anything, to say that the Philippines can't learn from Malaysia or Indonesia is wrong. It's because of the history of the settlers themselves!

From the Day Translations Blog, I found 10 interesting facts about the Filipino language. I would like to share one aspect of the Filipino language that I find interesting:

6. The precursor of Filipino, the Tagalog language is not a pure language. It developed from various influences.

The early ancestors of the Filipinos were Negritos or Aetas from Asia who came to the Philippines through land bridges. They were small people with wide noses, black skin, thick lips, and slinky hair. Two types of Indonesians followed them. The first to arrive were tall, with thin lips, high noses, large foreheads, and light skin. The second wave of Indonesian immigrants were shorter, with darker skins, heavy jaws, thick lips and large noses. After the Indonesians, Malays migrated to the Philippines as well. It is one of the reasons why it is difficult to define the identity of the Filipino through physical looks, unlike the Chinese or Japanese.

These groups of people influenced the early development of the Tagalog language. Researchers found evidence of Bahasa Indonesia, Malay and even Sanskrit. They later replaced the language with Castilian Spanish. They used it as a medium of instruction for the elite, while the rest couldn’t learn Spanish. Later, Tagalog became peppered with loan words from Spanish as well as loan words from Chinese and English.

I also remembered trying to decode the song "Dayang Dayang" (read here). Often mistaken as an Indian song (probably due to the parody by the late Yoyoy Villame), it's actually a song written in an indigenous language. Some say it's from Mindanao while others say it's from Malaysia or Indonesia. Some say there was a singer named Hainun Pangilan. There was the Indonesian singer Virvina Vica. The Sinama language is found in Southeast Asia. The song "Dayang Dayang" has many versions. I guess the popularized version (which I think is mistakenly attributed to Bollywood actress, Rai Aishwarya) is spoken in another Indonesian language. 

I wasn't too surprised to find so many common terms that have the same meaning. Sure, there are some spelling differences like takut and takot for scared. The language of Indonesia and Malaysia can also be found among Taiwanese natives. No surprise that various indigenous dances in Asia are very similar to the indigenous dances in the Philippines. Why should it be surprising that Filipino languages have a lot of things in common with its Southeast Asian neighbors?

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