Tagalog people: Difference between revisions
Austronesian ethnic group indigenous to southern Luzon
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Katagalugan |
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A maginoo (nobility) couple, both wearing blue-coloured clothing articles (blue being the distinctive colour of their class), c. 16th century.
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| 28,273,666 (2020 census)[1] | |
 Philippines(Metro Manila, Calabarzon, Central Luzon, Mimaropa)
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| Tagalog (Filipino), English, other Philippine languages | |
| Predominantly Christianity (mostly Catholic), minority Islam, Buddhism, Anitism (Tagalog religion) |
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| Other Filipino ethnic groups, other Austronesian peoples |
The Tagalog people (Tagalog: mga Tagalog) are the largest ethnolinguistic group in the Philippines.[N 1] An Austronesian people, the Tagalogs are native to the Metro Manila and Calabarzon regions of southern Luzon, and comprise the majority in the provinces of Bulacan, Bataan, Nueva Ecija and Aurora in Central Luzon and in the islands of Marinduque and Mindoro in Mimaropa.
Etymology[edit]
The commonly perpetuated origin for the endonym “Tagalog” is the term tagá-ilog, which means “people from [along] the river” (the prefix tagá- meaning “coming from” or “native of”). However, this explanation is a mistranslation of the correct term tagá-álog, which means “people from the ford“.[2][3][4]
Historical usage[edit]
Before the colonial period, the term “Tagalog” was originally used to differentiate river dwellers (taga-ilog) from mountain dwellers (taga-bundok, less common tingues[5]) between Nagcarlan and Lamon Bay, despite speaking the same language. Further exceptions include the present-day Batangas Tagalogs, who referred to themselves as people of Kumintang – a distinction formally maintained throughout the colonial period.[6]
Allegiance to a bayan differentiated between its natives called tawo and foreigners, who either also spoke Tagalog or other languages – the latter called samot or samok.[7][8]
Beginning in the Spanish colonial period, documented foreign spellings of the term ranged from Tagalos to Tagalor.[9]
History[edit]
Prehistory and origins[edit]
Like the majority of Filipinos, the Tagalog people primarily descend from seafaring Austronesians who migrated southwards to the Philippine islands from the island of Taiwan some 4,000 years ago. This means that the Tagalogs, like virtually all other Filipinos, are related to the Austronesian-speaking peoples of present-day Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, and the more distant Micronesians, Polynesians, and Malagasy. Contact with the much earlier arrived Negritos resulted in a gradually developed scenario seen throughout the Philippine archipelago of coastal, lowland, predominantly Austronesian-speaking seafaring settlements and land-based Negrito hunter-gatherers confined to forested and mountainous inlands, along with inland Austronesians oriented towards rivers. Both groups variably mixed with each other from millennia of general coexistence, yet even up to Spanish advent social distinctions between them still remained.[citation needed]
Specific origin narratives of the Tagalog people contend among several theories:
- Eastern Visayas – Research on the Philippine languages hypothesize a Greater Central Philippine subfamily that includes, among others, the Bisayan languages and Tagalog, the latter vaguely assumed to have originated somewhere in the eastern Visayas.
- Borneo via Panay – The controversial Maragtas dates events from around the early 13th century, which tells of a great migration of ten datus and their followers somewhere from Borneo northwards and subsequent settlements in Panay, escaping the tyranny of their Bornean overlord, Rajah Makatunaw. Sometime later, three datus Kalengsusu, Puti, and Dumaksol sailed back from Panay to Borneo, then intended to make return for Panay before blowing off course further north to the Taal river area in present-day Batangas. Datu Puti continued to Panay, while Kalengsusu and Dumaksol decided to settle there with their barangay followings, thus the story says is the origin of the Tagalogs.[10]
- Sumatra or Java – A twin migration of Tagalog and Kapampangan peoples from either somewhere in Sumatra or Java in present-day Indonesia. Dates unknown, but this theory holds the least credibility regardless for basing these migrations from the outdated out-of-Sundaland model of the Austronesian expansion.[11]
The scholar R. David Zorc, reconstructed the origins and prehistory of the Tagalog people based on linguistic evidence. The prehistory of the Tagalogs began slightly more than one thousand years ago, when the Tagalog language first emerged as a separate speech variety. Tagalog is classified as a Central Philippine language, and is therefore closely related to the Bikol, Bisayan and Mansakan languages. The Tagalog people originated in the general area of the Tagalog people: Difference between revisions