Talk:Central Visayas Voyage Tips and guide

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Manuel L Quezon, a Tagalog, was head of the Commonwealth government from 1935 to his death in exile from wartime Japanese occupation in 1944. One of the nationalistic movements pushed by the Tagalogs, together with other groups, was a language movement that declared "Pilipino" as the national language. Lope K. Santos developed his grammar for the Tagalog language in the first decade of the 20th century, and the movers and shakers in Philippine government and society adopted Tagalog as a basis for the new official language, with an official intention to change the lexicon and possibly the syntax to accommodate other ethnic groups. However, this good intention really never eventuated.

Although the national language of Pilipino (based on the Southern Luzon dialect of Tagalog) is technically an official language and taught in schools, it is somewhat resented throughout this region as it is seen as a symbol of the unfair domination/hegemony of the Metro Manila, the National Capital Region of the Philippines.

To this day, Tagalog is by far and away the main grammatical and lexical basis for the official Pilipino language, although words from other Philippine languages are included in a tokenistic way. Because of its similarity or resemblance to Tagalog, some people use the word Tagalog in describing the official Pilipino language. Also, because the official Pilipino language includes grammatical and lexical elements from other Philippine languages, this official Pilipino language is an amalgamation that is generally not intelligible by anyone speaking one of the real spoken languages in the Philippines, including Tagalog! In practice, the official Pilipino language is not spoken, but is approximated by speaking Tagalog.

All this has resulted in considerable resentment by members of the non-dominant Philippine language groups, who continue to use their own languages instead of Pilipino in their formal and informal transactions. Also, since members of other language groups have likely learned Tagalog, not official Pilipino, in school and through the media, they may not identify as speaking Pilipino and may instead identify as being Tagalog-speaking. One must keep in mind that officially Pilipino is not the same as Tagalog but, from a practical standpoint official Pilipino does not exist as a spoken language.

Rather laughably, in view of the increasing dependence of the Philippines on remittances from overseas Filipino workers often employed in English language situations, the government and the educational leaders of the country have decreasingly used English as one of the unifying languages for the Philippines. Tagalog is taught and increasingly used in the national media, and Tagalog in the media is increasingly being mixed with English. Tagalog is morphing to become Taglish in the media. This trend will likely continue as the commercial education system increasingly adopts English in all areas of the country as being necessary to get ahead.

The Sentro ng Wikang Filipino (SWF) has started to increase the vocabulary for Filipino, first adding words from other Philippine languages from a Tagalog base, and then adding words from English and other Indo-European languages. The goal of SWF seems to create a language that will express scholastic as well as ordinary ideas, thoughts and nuances that are common to Filipinos of whatever ethnic group. In reality this is probably a naive idea that will probably instead lead to political balkanization and handicapping Tagalog speakers with a continuing idea of their own national superiority.