Not to be confused with Taglish or Bislish.

Philippine English

Native to Philippines

Region Southeast Asia

Native speakers L1: 200,000 (2020)[1]

L2 speakers: 52 million (2020)[1]

Language family Indo-European

 Germanic
 West Germanic
 Ingvaeonic
 Anglo-Frisian
 Anglic
 English
 Asian English
 American
English and Southea
st Asian English
 Philippine English

Early forms Proto-Indo-European

 Proto-Germanic
 Proto-West Germanic
 Proto-English
 Old English
 Middle English
 Early Modern English
 Modern English

Official status
Official Philippines
language in

Language codes

ISO 639-3 –

Glottolog phil1246

IETF en-PH[2]
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Speech examples
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Sound file of a man and woman speaking with Philippine English accents.

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 see also: List of dialects of English

Teaching
 Teaching English as a second language

 v
 t
 e

Philippine English (similar and related to American English) is

a variety of English native to the Philippines, including those used by the media and the
vast majority of educated Filipinos and English learners in the Philippines from adjacent
Asian countries. English is taught in schools as one of the two official languages of the
country, the other being Filipino, a standardized form of Tagalog. Due to the influx of
Philippine English teachers overseas, Philippine English is also becoming the prevalent
variety of English being learned in the Far East as taught by Filipino teachers in various
Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Thailand among others.[citation needed] Due
to the highly multilingual and bilingual nature of the Philippines, code-switching such
as Taglish (Tagalog-infused English) and Bislish (English infused with any of
the Bisayan languages) is prevalent across domains from casual settings to formal
situations.[3][4][5][6][7][8]

History
[edit]
Filipinos were first introduced to English when the British invaded and occupied Manila
and Cavite in 1762 as part of the Seven Years' War. Still, this occupation had no lasting
effect on English in the country. A national variety called Philippine English evolved as a
result of American colonization and was arguably one of the fastest to develop in the
postcolonial world. Its origins as an English language spoken by a large segment of the
Philippine population can be traced to the American introduction of public education,
taught in the English medium of instruction. This was marked by the arrival of
the Thomasites in 1901, immediately during re-colonization after the Philippine
Revolution in the late 19th century up to early 1900. After a tumultuous period of
colonial transition, Filipino leaders and elites, and the American colonial government
alike began discussing the formation of a Philippine national language. The retained
high ethnolinguistic diversity of the new colony was due to a low penetration of Spanish
under Spain's rule. Spanish was limited to a medium of instruction for the landed
elites and gentry. By the end of Spanish colonization and the Philippine–American
War in 1903, only 10% of the colonial population could speak Spanish.[9][10] The lingering
effects of Spanish amongst the general population nevertheless had notable effects on
the lexical development of many Philippine languages, and even Philippine English, in
the form of Hispanisms.[11] Tagalog was selected as the basis for a national language in
1937,[12] and has since remained so. It was re-labelled as Pilipino in 1959,
[13]
and Filipino in 1987. With the successful establishment of American-style public
education with English as a consequential medium, more than 20% of the Philippine
population was reported to be able to understand and speak English just before the turn
of the mid-20th century.[10] This meteoric growth was sustained post-World War II, much
further through Philippine mass media (e.g., newsprint, radio, television), where English
also became the dominant language,[14] and by the ratification into the current Philippine
Constitution in 1987, both Filipino and English were declared co-official languages,
while removing Spanish as an official language. In 2020, the Philippines was ranked
27th worldwide (among 100 countries ranked) in the EF English Proficiency Index. In
the same report, it was ranked 2nd in Asia next only to Singapore.[15]

Today Philippine English, as formally called based on the World Englishes framework of
linguist Braj Kachru, is a recognized variety of English with its distinct lexical,
phonological, and grammatical features (with considerable variations across
socioeconomic groups and level of education being predictors of English proficiency in
the Philippines). As the English language became highly embedded in Philippine
society, it was only a matter of time before the language was indigenized to the point
that it became differentiated from English varieties found in the United States, United
Kingdom, or elsewhere. This, along with the formal introduction of the World Englishes
(WE) framework to English language scholars in the Philippines, opened the floodgates
to research on this new emerging English, which has since been branded as such as
Philippine English.[16]

Philippine English in the services sector

[edit]
Main article: Call center industry in the Philippines
The abundant supply of English speakers and competitive labor costs enabled the
Philippines to become a choice destination for foreign companies wishing to
establish call centers and other outsourcing.[17][18][19] English proficiency sustains a major
call center industry and in 2005, America Online had 1,000 people in what used to be
the US Air Force's Clark Air Base in Angeles City answering ninety percent of their
global e-mail inquiries. Citibank does its global ATM programming in the country,
and Procter & Gamble has over 400 employees in Makati, a central Manila
neighborhood, doing back office work for their Asian operations including finance,
accounting, human resources and payments processing.

An influx of foreign students, principally from South Korea, has also led to growth in the
number of English language learning centers,[20] especially in Metro
Manila, Baguio, Metro Cebu and Metro Bacolod.[21]

Positioning
[edit]
In 2003, Edgar W. Schneider defined a Dynamic Model of the evolution of Postcolonial
Englishes, positioning Philippine English in Phase 3, Nativization.[22] In 2016, Ariane
Macalinga Borlongan argued in a research article that that Philippine English had met
the parameters set for repositioning into Phase 4, Endonormative stabilization.[23]

Orthography
[edit]
Philippine laws and court decisions, with extremely rare exceptions, are written solely in
English. English is also used in higher education, religious affairs, print and broadcast
media, and business. Most well-educated Filipinos are bilingual and speak English as
one of their languages. For highly technical subjects such as nursing, medicine,
computing and mathematics, English is the preferred medium for textbooks and
communication. Very few would prefer highly technical books in either Filipino or the
regional language.[24][25] Movies and TV shows in English are usually not dubbed in most
cable channels[26] except a few such as Tagalized Movie Channel.[27]

Because English is part of the curricula from primary to secondary education, many
Filipinos write and speak in fluent Philippine English, although there might be
differences in pronunciation.[28] Most schools in the Philippines, however, are staffed by
teachers who are speakers of Philippine English and hence notable differences from the
American English from which it was derived are observable.

Grammar
[edit]
Philippine English traditionally follows American English spelling and grammar while it
shares some similarity to Commonwealth English. Philippine English follows the latter
when it comes to punctuation as well as date notations. For example, a comma almost
never precedes the final item in an enumeration (much like the AP Stylebook and other
style guides in English-language journalism generally).[citation needed]

 Dates are often read with a cardinal instead of an ordinal number. (Example:
January 1 is pronounced as "January one" instead of "January first" or "the first of
January".)
 Tautologies like redundancy and pleonasm are common despite the emphasis on
avoiding them, stressing brevity and simplicity in making sentences; they are
common to many speakers, especially among the older generations. The possible
explanation is that the English language teachers who came to the Philippines were
taught old-fashioned grammar, thus they spread that style to the students they
served.
 Examples are "At this point in time" and ".. will be the one ..." (or "... will be the
one who will ...") instead of "now" and "... will ..." respectively - e.g., "I will be the
one who will go ...", rather than "I will go ...".[29]
 Collective nouns are generally singular in construction, e.g., my family is doing
well as opposed to my family are doing well or the group was walking as opposed
to the group were walking following American English.
 The past tense and past participles of the verbs learn, spell and smell are often
regular (learned, spelled, smelled) in Philippine English. These are also the case in
American English.
 River follows the name of the river in question following American English,
e.g., Pasig River, rather than the British convention of coming before the name,
e.g., River Thames.
 Abbreviations such as Mr and Mrs are spelled with a final period (cf. Mr., Mrs.)
following American spelling.
 While prepositions before days may be omitted in American English, e.g., She
resigned Thursday, they are usually retained in Philippine English: She resigned on
Thursday. However, those prepositions are usually omitted in journalistic writing.
 The institutional nouns hospital and university sometimes do not take the definite
article, e.g. He's in hospital and She's at university, while sometimes they do,
e.g. He's in the hospital and She's at the university.[citation needed]
 Ranges of dates use to, e.g., Monday to Friday, rather than Monday through Friday.
This is shared with British English and is in contrast to American English.
 When speaking or writing out numbers, and is not inserted before the tens, i.e., five
hundred sixty-nine rather than five hundred and sixty-nine. This is in contrast to
British English. Additionally, the insertion of and is also common in American
English.
 The preposition to in write to (e.g. I'll write to you [something]) is always retained, as
opposed to American usage where it may be dropped.
 When referring to time, Filipinos refer to 12:30 as half past twelve or,
alternatively, twelve thirty and do not use the British half twelve. Similarly, (a)
quarter to twelve is used for 11:45 rather than (a) quarter of twelve, which is found in
American English.
 To take a shower or take a bath are the most common usages in Philippine English,
following American English, whereas British English uses have a shower and have
a bath. However, bathe is as often as similar to American or British usage, but not
widespread.
 Directional suffix -ward(s) generally found in British English is the primary usage in
Philippine English, therefore towards, afterwards and upwards over the
American toward, afterward and upward. However, forward is more prevalent than
the chiefly British forwards. Philippine English speakers drop the -s when
using phrasal verbs such as look forward to.
 When reading decimal numerals that are usually two or three digits, each numeral is
read like a whole number rather than by each digit, e.g. (0).99 is (zero) point ninety-
nine, instead of (zero) point nine nine or, especially in schools, ninety-nine
hundredths in both British and American English. Additionally, four-digit decimals
are also treated similar to how Americans read four-digit numbers with non-zero
tens and ones as pairs of two-digit numbers without saying "hundred" and inserting
"oh"; 3.1416 is thus "three point fourteen sixteen" and not "three point one four one
six" as pronounced.