Ethnolinguistic Groups

Apa Feliciano

We Filipinos consider ourselves a curious lot—quite a number of us have been Christened and baptized with Spanish-sounding names, with a heritage rooted in Malay and Chinese and a culture so Westernized that our most prevalent language is a mix of English and Filipino, known as Taglish. The debate surrounding the Filipino national identity has most likely subsided in acceptance of this diversity in our roots, regardless if our country’s name, the Philippines, originated from a 16th century Spanish monarch.

Interestingly, we have 80 identified ethno-linguistic language groups with 500 sub-dialects to further compound this complexity. I took pride in knowing this cultural bit because prior to working in the country’s Ministry of Culture, I fell into the category of the uninformed and the fact that the threads that bind this country are technically different but essentially the same contributed to a curiosity that up until today persists. On another end of this spectrum was the revelation that our very own indigenous peoples (IP) took so little pride in being called indigenous—or tribal, as the officialdom would call them. To them, this meant being regarded “differently” and at times “backward”, perhaps made worse by the fact that the poorest communities in the Philippines include indigenous settlements.