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Tagalog linguistic data
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Common questions about Tagalog
What linguistic data does this Tagalog page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment (Philippine voice system), script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Tagalog's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Tagalog data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
What is the Philippine voice/focus system?
The verb takes an affix that indicates which argument of the sentence is the 'focus', and the focused argument is marked with the topic particle ang. Actor focus: bumili siya 'he bought (something)'. Patient focus: binili niya 'he bought it'. Location focus: binilhan niya 'he bought (it) from (somewhere)'. The pattern is a hallmark of Philippine languages, distinct from the active/passive of European languages.
What's the difference between Tagalog and Filipino?
Filipino is the standardized national language of the Philippines, based primarily on Tagalog with the official mandate to incorporate vocabulary from other Philippine languages. In practice, Filipino and Tagalog are very close — speakers often use the names interchangeably, though linguists distinguish them.
Why does Tagalog cluster with Cebuano or Ilocano on similarity scores?
All three are Philippine Austronesian languages with shared voice/focus system, predicate-initial order, and core typology, plus extensive cognate vocabulary. Tagalog and Cebuano are not mutually intelligible despite the structural overlap. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Tagalog
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Schachter, Paul & Otanes, Fe T. (1972). Tagalog Reference Grammar. University of California Press.
- Kroeger, Paul (1993). Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
- Ramos, Teresita V. (1971). Tagalog Structures. University of Hawaii Press.
- De Guzman, Videa P. (1978). "Syntactic Derivation of Tagalog Verbs." Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication.