The 30th Anniversary of the People Power Revolution: The Philippines and Tagalog

February 25th marks the 30th anniversary of the People Power Revolution (also known as the EDSA Revolution - named after the stretch of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue where much of the demonstration took place) in the Philippines. In 1986, from February 23rd to February 25th, thousands of Filipinos took part in peaceful demonstrations which would eventually lead to the unseating of President Ferdinand Marcos, and the restoration of a democratic government in the Philippines. Not a single shot was fired.

You can watch a video about the revolution here.

And if you weren’t that familiar with The Philippines or the Tagalog language before now, keep reading.

Called the “Pearl of the Orient Seas,” the Philippines owes much of its natural beauty to its unique geography. Part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is the world’s second largest archipelago, with a cluster of 7,107 islands, many of them extinct volcanoes and atolls. It has one of the largest coastlines in the world, totaling over 22,000 miles, as well as one of the richest biogeographic areas, with 150 million hectares of marine waters.

The island groups of the Visayas and Palawan, with their pristine white-sand beaches and world-class diving sites, have many of the country’s main natural attractions: El Nido, Boracay, and Bohol, to name but a few. On the two largest islands, Luzon in the north and Mindanao in the south, the terrain is mostly mountainous and offers more natural wonders. Worth mentioning is the Cordillera, a vast mountain range occupying nearly half of northern Luzon and site of the famed 2,000-year-old rice terraces of Banaue, carved out of the mountains by the Ifugao tribe. In Mindanao there is Mt. Apo, the country’s highest peak, where the endangered Philippine eagle, the largest in the world, still survives in its lush rainforests. There are 21 active volcanoes, including Mt. Mayon in Albay province, which is the most active and considered the most perfect cone volcano, and the mysterious Taal Volcano, one of the world’s smallest, which rises from the crater lake of another extinct volcano.

 

There are more than 50 million speakers of Tagalog in the Philippines, mostly in the southern parts of Luzon, the archipelago’s largest island. Other dialects spoken in the Philippines include Cebuano, Ilokano, Waray-Waray, Hiligaynon, Pangasinan, Bikol, Maranao, Maguindanao, Tausug, and Kapampangan, but the official language, Filipino, is based on Tagalog. There are also significant numbers of Tagalog-speaking communities in other countries, with the largest in the United States where it ranks as the sixth most-spoken language.

Derived from “Taga-ilog,” which literally means “from the river,” Tagalog is an Austronesian language belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian subfamily, with outside influences from Malay and Chinese, and later from both Spanish and American English through four centuries of colonial rule. This influence is seen in Tagalog words and their spelling.

Tagalog had its own writing system based on an ancient script called the Baybayin that uses a syllabic alphabet, which the Spanish colonialists romanized. Even the modern alphabet has been changed several times to incorporate foreign sounds from both Spanish and English.

There are thousands of loan words in Tagalog, particularly from Spanish, and the use of “Taglish,” the mixing of Tagalog and English, is common, especially in urban areas. In both spoken and written Tagalog, English words (sometimes spelled according to their Tagalog pronunciation, oftentimes not) are used alongside words of Spanish origin. Some of these borrowed words do have equivalent forms in Tagalog but their use is reserved for formal or literary language. But many of these loan words do not have Tagalog counterparts, especially those that refer to objects or concepts that did not exist in the country prior to the arrival of Westerners.

However, in spite of all the foreign borrowings in Tagalog, the richness of the language remains intact. Foreign words are not absorbed into the language without being subjected to the complexity of Tagalog’s system of affixes—or syllables or letters fixed within a word—which permits any noun to be turned into a verb and vice versa. If language is the collective product of the genius of a people, as linguist Wilhelm Humboldt put it, affixation is the genius of Tagalog and its challenge as well.

Want to learn more Tagalog? You can start right away with our online course, or if you prefer to learn with a book, check out our Spoken World Tagalog course here.