Tagalog
It is one of the two official languages of Philipines. It belongs to Central Philippine branch of Austronesian family of languages. It was renamed to Pilipino in 1961 and now Tagalog based National language called Pilipino is used in media, government, business and public schools. It was declared national language of Philippines due to its extensive use, rich literary history and was considered revolution against colonialism. It is spoken by around 24 million people as first language and more than 65 million people as second language.
Earlier Tagalog was based on South Asian script but recent writings in Tagalog has adopted Latin alphabets. It has 16 consonants and 5 vowels. It is a highly phonetic language which means that words are spelled as they are pronounced. It is a stress language which means that words which may spell same can have different meanings distinguished by the level of stress. Its vocabulary consists of words from Malay, Spanish and English. However some words familiar in English can have different meanings. Sentence structure is a bit different from English and plurals are expressed with a particle ‘mga’. Usually masculine and feminine nouns are distinguished by whether a word ends in ‘o’ or ‘a’. Numbers in Tagalog can be not only in Tagalog but in Spanish and English as well.
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