Spanish language in the Philippines

El Consejo de los Dioses by José Rizal, published in 1880 in Manila.

File:Emilio Aguinaldo Speech in Spanish (1929).webm

Spanish was the first official language and unifying language of the Philippines. It was used from the arrival of the Spaniards in 1565 until the second half of the 20th century. Besides being official, Spanish became the common language and lingua franca of the country between the late 19th century and the early 20th. In 1863 a system of public education was created that considerably boosted knowledge of Spanish in the country.

José Rizal wrote most of his works in Spanish, as did most Filipino writers and thinkers of the 19th century. The Philippine Revolution was articulated in the Spanish language, and the First Philippine Republic, founded in 1899, established Spanish as the official language. The first Constitution of the Philippines as an independent country, as well as its Filipino national anthem, were originally written in Spanish.

During the first half of the 20th century, the Spanish language was very widespread in the large cities. It was the language of the press, culture, commerce and, to a large extent, of Filipino politics. Spanish kept its official status (together with English and Tagalog) until 1973, a status it had held since 1571. After its removal as an official language in 1973, it was also removed as a compulsory university subject in 1987, although Presidential Proclamation No. 155 of March 15 of that same year 1973, still in force, ordered that Spanish continue to be an official language in the Philippines for all those official documents of the imperial era that were not translated into the national language, among them numerous articles of the Philippine Civil and Penal Codes.

In 2009, the academic and former Filipino President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was awarded the Don Quixote International Prize, which recognizes the educational initiative of the Republic of the Philippines to introduce the Spanish language into the national curricula, broadening the area of political, institutional and economic collaboration carried out in the Castilian language. In this regard, on February 23, 2010, during the 5th Spain–Philippines Tribune, an agreement was reached between the Department of Education of the Philippines, the Ministry of Education of Spain, the Instituto Cervantes and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), whereby all secondary school students in the Philippines would study Spanish in 2012.

Today, however, the Spanish language remains only an optional language in Filipino schools and is spoken as a second language by 3% of the country's population. Although the historiography of the American invaders (and the later Filipino historiography based on the same data, which in many cases lack references or are invented) asserts that the spread of the Spanish language in the archipelago was never widespread, Hispanist authors such as the Filipino Guillermo Gómez Rivera maintain that it was spoken by as much as 60% of the population until the early 20th century. Along the same lines, Manuel L. Quezon, first President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, in his speech before the United States Congress in October 1914, declared that:

...there were public schools in the Philippines long before the American occupation and, in fact, I was educated in one of these schools, even though my hometown is such a small town, isolated in the mountains of the northeastern part of the island of Luzon. ...as early as 1866, when the total population of the Philippine Islands was only 4,411,261 souls, and when the total number of municipalities in the archipelago was 900, the total of public schools was 841 for boys and 833 for girls, and the total number of children attending these schools was 135,098 boys and 95,260 girls. And these schools were real buildings and the pupils living, intelligent and alert human beings. In 1892, the number of schools had increased to 2,137, of which 1,087 were for boys and 1,050 for girls. I have seen with my own eyes many of these schools and thousands of these pupils. They were not religious schools, but schools created, supported and maintained by the (Spanish) Government.

Today, the Spanish language remains very present in most local languages, especially in Chavacano, which uses it for a large percentage of its vocabulary. Spanish is also found both in the given names and surnames of the great majority of Filipinos (anthroponyms) and in the names of many of their localities (toponyms) and administrative divisions.

History

Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, by Antonio de Morga (1609)

The Spanish language began to be used in the Philippines from 1565, the year in which the expedition of Miguel López de Legazpi and Andrés de Urdaneta, coming from New Spain (today Mexico), arrived in Cebu and founded the first Spanish settlement in the archipelago.

At first, learning Spanish was optional, not compulsory. As in many places in America, the missionaries preached Catholicism to the natives in the local languages. In 1593 the first local printing press was founded. In 1595 the country's first academic institution was established, the Colegio de San Ildefonso, founded by the Jesuits in Cebu, which would later become the University of San Carlos. In Manila, the University of Santo Tomas was founded by the Dominicans in 1611. Both universities dispute the recognition of being the oldest university in Asia.

In 1863, Queen Isabella II of Spain decreed the creation of a public school system in all Spanish territories. This led to the creation of public schools with instruction in Spanish in most towns and cities of the Philippines. At the beginning of the 20th century, Spanish remained the lingua franca of the country and the language of education, the press, commerce, politics and justice.

Study hall of the Ateneo Municipal de Manila

In Manila, the use of the Spanish language had become so widespread that around 50% of the capital's population was estimated to be able to communicate in Spanish at the end of the 19th century. In 1898, it is estimated that around 15 or 20% of the archipelago's population could speak Spanish. A few years earlier the percentage would have been considerably lower, being around 2 or 3% in 1870 according to data from the statistician Agustín de la Cavada y Méndez de Vigo. Even after the American occupation and the introduction of English as the language of instruction in public schools, and despite the death of 15% of the entire Filipino population in the Philippine–American War, the great majority of them educated subversives and former soldiers (and therefore surely mostly able to speak Spanish), the use of the Spanish language continued to predominate in the main cities as the principal vehicle of communication among Filipinos, until at least the second decade of the 20th century, when education in any language other than English was prohibited.

The official language of all courts and their records would be Spanish until January 1, 1913. After that date, English would be the official language, but in judicial matters the Spanish language could be used, with interpreters being provided, and in cases in which all the parties or attorneys so stipulated in writing, proceedings would be conducted in Spanish.

The arguments were clear:

"... The superiority of the English language is not asserted over others that possess Literature and History, with the exception, perhaps, that it is becoming so rapidly the language of the business of the world, above all in the Far East, that the countries leading in commercial and scientific endeavor have almost universally made its study a part of their public school system. It is the only language that it was possible to teach generally throughout the Archipelago. Unfortunately, the policy of the former sovereignty here did not permit the general teaching of the Spanish language, so that it was known by the comparatively few. Since the ability to use a common language is one of the essential elements for the realization of the political aspirations of the Filipino people, it is important to see how far we have advanced in this direction..."

— Message of the Governor-General to the Third Philippine Legislature.

On December 31, 1916, the Official Gazette (Boletín Oficial) was created, to be published weekly and separately in both the Spanish and English languages.

Photograph of the Intramuros district destroyed in the Battle of Manila during World War II.

The predominance of Spanish over English continued in constant decline until approximately the end of World War II. From then on, with two generations already educated in English, Spanish lost relevance. In addition, the destruction of the districts of Intramuros and La Ermita by American aviation during the Battle of Manila put an end to the main center of Hispanic culture and the Spanish language in the Philippines (some 300,000 Spanish speakers in Intramuros alone). Although there are some family and personal exceptions, the generation born in the postwar period (until approximately 1950) is usually considered the last Spanish-speaking generation, at which point, after the massacre of the failed war of independence, linguistic repression and the bombings of World War II, Spanish-speaking society is considered to have been diluted, and there was no further Spanish-speaking generational succession.

Currently, fully competent Spanish-speaking Filipinos, at least at the oral level, are not monolingual in Spanish and only in exceptional cases are younger than 55, due to the lack of continuity of generational succession in the use of the language.

Influence on other languages

There are approximately 8,000 Spanish roots in Tagalog, and around 6,000 Spanish roots in the Visayan languages and other Filipino dialects. The Spanish numeral system, the calendar, time, etc., continue to be used with slight modifications.

Thousands of Spanish words have been preserved in Tagalog and other local languages, such as:

• bapór (vapor, ship),
• baka, (vaca, cow),
• kastilà was used to refer to the Spaniards (Castilians) and their language.
• kuwarta (cuarta, money),
• pera (perra or 'coins'),
• relós (reloj, watch, originally with the French sound of the j),
• sabón (jabón, soap; the j was pronounced like the French je),
• baraha (baraja, deck of playing cards),
• lamesa/mesa (mesa, table),
• kaldereta (caldereta, meat stew),
• tinidór (tenedor, fork),
• silya (silla, chair),
• baso (vaso, glass),
• bangkito (banqueta, small chair),

Chavacano, also called Zamboangueño (in the city of Zamboanga) or Chabacano, is a creole language lexified by the Spanish of the Philippines. Chavacano was concentrated in several very specific areas, of which it remains vital only in the city of Zamboanga. Other areas where Chavacano was spoken include Isabela (Basilan) and parts of Davao, in the south, and on the northern island of Luzon, Ternate and other parts of the Province of Cavite.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Tagalog printer Tomás Pinpin undertook the task of writing a book in Tagalog with Latin characters in order to teach Spanish to the Tagalogs. His book, published by the Dominican press where he worked, appeared in 1610, the same year in which Father Blancas de San José published the first Grammar of Tagalog.

Pinpin's text, for its part, used Tagalog to discourse on Spanish. With the book, Pinpin was the first native Filipino to be a writer and publisher. As such, it is instructive when he explains the interest that drove him to translate from Tagalog at the beginning of the viceregal era. Pinpin crafts his translation by evading rather than rejecting the accentuation rules of the Spanish language.

False friends

The following words are misleading. They seem to be Spanish, or they are Spanish words that changed meaning in various Filipino languages.

• baho means 'smells bad' (similar to bajo).
• barkada means 'gang, group of friends' (similar to barcada).
• kontrabida means 'villain' (similar to contra vida).
• sabi means 'to say' (similar to sabe).
• siguro means 'perhaps' (similar to seguro).
• syempre means 'of course' (similar to siempre).
• pirmi in Visayan and Chavacano means 'always' (derived from firme).
• basta means 'provided that'.
• lupa means 'soil, earth'.
• luto means 'to cook'.
• maske/maski means 'even' or 'however' (similar to más que).
• kubeta means 'toilet' (derived from cubeta).
• kasilyas in Visayan and Chavacano means 'toilet' (derived from casillas).
• lamierda/lamyerda means 'to go out partying' (similar to la mierda).
• puto means 'a rice cake' (similar to the masculine of puta; in some countries of Hispanic America it means 'homosexual', 'prostitute' and in others 'womanizer').
• sugal means 'games of chance' (similar to jugar).
• mamón means 'soft bread'.
• pera means perra or 'money'.
• kasí/kasé means 'because', 'it's that' (coming from the English because), similar to casi.
• silbí means 'purpose', 'use' (similar to servir).
• palengke means 'market' (derived from the Mexicanism palenque).

Nevertheless, the word used to designate caja fuerte ('safe') has almost the same meaning in Spanish, since it is called caja de hierro.

Filipinisms (words of Filipino origin)

The following words can be found in the Diccionario de la lengua española of the RAE:

• carabao
• barangay
• yo-yo
• abacá
• cogón
• sampaguita
• baguio (hurricane)
• paipay
• bolo (large knife with a long blade, used as a weapon, for cutting branches or as a farming tool).
• dalaga
• feluz (This is a Filipinism not yet documented by the RAE, meaning 'velvet', which comes from Tagalog and Visayan pelus, and this from the French term velours).
• dabuti, dabuten or the hypercorrection buten (in Filipino, mabuti)

Incorporations into Philippine Spanish

• Nahuatlisms, taken from the Diccionario de Filipinismos published in 1921.

Linguistic nationalism

Spanish in the Philippines was a vector of nationalism in the face of two empires: Spain and the United States. The nativist attitude criticized Spanish in the Philippines as an imperial imposition; in reality, the friars and officials strove to learn the indigenous languages. In any case, the native elites decided to educate themselves in Spanish, and these in turn were imitated by the urban population. Considering this phenomenon, it becomes necessary for the scholar of the history and culture of the Philippines to know a language in which an extensive amount of legal and administrative documentation was written in the Hispanic era, in addition to an important corpus of historical, linguistic and literary interest. It includes the first great works of Filipino literature, as well as some of the most complete and detailed descriptive grammars that have been written on many of the country's native languages.

This was carried out by clerics of the various orders, especially the Jesuits, just as happened in Hispanic America with languages such as Quechua, Guaraní or Nahuatl). Also written in Spanish were the first constitution as an independent republic, its national anthem, its proclamations, its government decrees, etc.

La Solidaridad

During the government of the Captaincy General of the Philippines and, to a certain extent, during that of the American administration, Spanish was the lingua franca that served the purpose of national unification, since Tagalog did not yet have the prominent role it later obtained. Each region had its own language and culture, and their inhabitants saw themselves as Ilocano, Kapampangan, Cebuano, etc. That is, still without awareness of being Filipino.

The language began to become widespread starting with the modernization decrees of the governments of Isabella II of Spain, in the mid-19th century. The members of the mestizo or Spanish social estate who contributed to the spread of Hispanic language and culture were known as the "ilustrados". After Spain's exit and under American domination, they gave themselves the mission of taking over from Spain in the propagation of an identity and nationality of Hispanic roots, even at the cost of confronting the American designs to destroy every vestige of Hispanic culture in the Islands.

The Hispanic cause did not prosper in the Philippines, above all after a large part of those "ilustrados" perished in the American bombing of Manila in 1945, the soul and head of the future island nation, and, after the war, because that city was swelled by migrant masses alien to any Hispanicizing sense.

At the end of the 19th century, the native writer José Rizal, with his novels Noli me tangere and El filibusterismo, published in Belgium and Germany respectively, contributed for his part to highlighting the Malay component in the Filipino nationalist sense, while demanding that Spain promote education and, of course, the generalization of the Spanish language as a vehicle of information. From Rizal's work, the pro-independence group Katipunan extracted the most ardent slogans to fight Spanish domination.

Both novels were a plea against the defects of the Hispanic administration, especially the power conferred on the religious orders, which according to Rizal, a known Freemason, showed themselves to be oppressive. Rizal also wrote in Tagalog, his contributions to the linguistics of that native language being notable.

The religious orders of the islands were enraged by the publication of Rizal's works, and their Provincials did not relent until they got the Spanish authorities to apprehend and execute Rizal, today considered a martyr of colonialism and father of the Filipino homeland.

Period of American domination

Main article: American occupation of the Philippines

In 1898, the constituent assembly of the First Philippine Republic, active in Malolos, Bulacan, established Spanish as the first official language. Hispanic rule then came to an end. Most of the media such as the press, radio, government documents and decrees, as well as education, still used Spanish. Spanish maintained its prestige and use until well into the 20th century. Some researchers state that it took more than fifty years for English to prevail over Spanish, above all because of the difficulty involved in learning English and (at first) because command of Spanish was a sign of high cultural and economic status.

Although English was promoted and even forced by the American colonial administration as the language of education and government, much of the literature of that time was written in the Spanish language. The reason is that most of the elites of that generation, educated in Spanish, were experiencing for the first time the freedom to dissent, this time against the American attempts to dismantle the Hispanic culture of the archipelago. The American military directorates harshly repressed the resistance, both of a nativist and of a Hispanist character.

In the Eighth Annual Report of the Director of Education David P. Barrows, dated August 1, 1908, the following observations on the Spanish language are found:

"... the adult population of the country, which includes persons of mature years and social influence, had the Spanish language as their tongue, so that the Spanish language itself continued to be the most important language spoken in all commercial, political and press circles".

This observation confirms the figure given by the lawyer Luciano de la Rosa on Spanish being the second language of 60 percent of the total population of the Philippines during the first four decades of the 1900s.

Another revealing source on the national extent to which the Spanish language was used in the Philippines is the Henry Ford Report of 1916 to the President of the United States.

Although the Census of 1903, prepared by the American occupation government, implied that the Spanish language "would be spoken by only ten (10) percent of Filipinos", the aforementioned Ford Report refutes it with its observations. It says: "There is, however, another aspect of this case that must be considered. This aspect presented itself to me when I was traveling through the islands, using ordinary transportation and mingling with all kinds of people of all conditions. Although on the basis of school statistics the statement is made that Filipinos who speak English are more (numerous) than those who speak any other language, no one will agree with this statement if he is to depend on the testimony of what reaches his ears. Everywhere Spanish is the language of business and of social intercourse."

The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, in 1925

"For anyone to obtain prompt attention from whomever, Spanish turns out to be more useful than English. And outside Manila, it is almost indispensable. Americans who travel throughout the islands customarily use it."

Although during the period of Spanish colonization some writers of note stood out, especially José Rizal y Alonso, praised by Miguel de Unamuno and read today in English or native translations by all schoolchildren in the Philippines, the true Golden Age of Spanish in the Philippines occurred after Spain's departure, when the native or mestizo social estate that had cooperated with the colonizing work reached its social coming of age. The Hispano-Filipino literature then produced, which we could call classical, is the work of "ilustrado" writers such as José Rizal, Pedro Paterno, Graciano López Jaena, Jesús Balmori, Antonio M. Abad, Manuel Bernabé, Adelina Gurrea, Guillermo Gómez Windham, Claro M. Recto... To these, well into the second half of the 20th century, were added Evangelina Guerrero, Federico Espino Licsi, Edmundo Farolán Romero, director of Revista Filipina, and Guillermo Gómez Rivera, the last two still active at the beginning of the 21st century.

Nationalism of Hispanic roots was at first propagated in Spanish, especially through the writings of Marcelo H. del Pilar (Plaridel), founder of the fortnightly publication La Solidaridad, which appeared in Barcelona and later in Madrid. The first Spanish-language newspaper of Cebu, titled El Boletín de Cebú, appeared in 1886. Around 1915, under pressure from American interests, local newspapers began to publish sections in English. In Cebu, where Hispanicizing groups also existed, the writer José del Mar won in 1965 with his work Perfiles the Zóbel Prize, instituted to contribute to maintaining Spanish as a cultural language of the islands.

Ironically, most Filipino literature in the Spanish language was published during the days of American domination. One of the most notable native writers in Spanish, Claro M. Recto, continued writing in Spanish until 1946. Other well-known writers who used Spanish in that period were the poets Isidro Marfori, Cecilio Apóstol (author of Pentélicas, 1941), Fernando María Guerrero (Crisálidas, 1914), Flavio Zaragoza Cano (Cantos a España and De Mactán a Tirad) and others.

Among the newspapers published in Spanish, those that stood out for their Hispanicizing militancy included El Renacimiento, La Democracia, La Vanguardia, El Debate, El Pueblo de Iloílo, El Tiempo and La Voz de Manila, among others. Three magazines, The Independent, Philippine Free Press and Philippine Review, were published with sections in both Spanish and English.

Current situation of Spanish in the Philippines

Speaker statistics

At present, around 2 million Filipinos speak Spanish as a second language, or with very limited competence based on the Chavacano creole, and there would be some 4,000 native speakers, almost all descendants of criollo families; these figures do not include Chavacano speakers. Spanish was an official language until the promulgation of the 1973 Constitution and a compulsory subject in universities until 1987.

The official statistics of the 1990 census indicated that there were only 2,657 speakers of Spanish as a mother tongue and another 689,000 of Chavacano (a creole lexified by Spanish), but they do not specify speakers of Spanish as a second or third language, nor speakers of Chavacano as a second language. The figures on the total number of speakers are not very precise; some of them are cited in the following table:

Source	Year	No. of native Spanish speakers	Total no. of speakers of Spanish as a first language or as a later-acquired language	No. of Chavacano speakers (creole lexified by Spanish)	Total speakers of Spanish and Chavacano
According to the INE, Spanish residents.	2020	4476
According to the Institute of Mexicans Abroad, Mexican residents.	2020	377
Instituto Cervantes of Manila. Rafael Rodríguez-Ponga	2014	3000	More than 1 million	1 million	2 million (2%)
Isaac Donoso (Filipinist philologist)	2008	6000	2 million	1.2 million	3.2 million
Francisco Moreno and Jaime Otero. Demografía de la Lengua Española (p. 33).	2007		438,882 (with native command)
Jaime Otero. El español en Asia-Pacífico (p. 418)	2004	3000	Between 1.5 and 2 million
Francisco Moreno and Jaime Otero. El español en el mundo. Anuario del Instituto Cervantes 1998 (pp. 78–79)	1998		1,816,289 (3%)
Antonio Quilis. La Lengua Española en Filipinas (p. 234)	1996		1,816,773 (3%)	1,200,000 as 1st and 2nd language	3,016,773 (5%)
R.W.Thompson. Pluricentric languages: differing norms in different nations (p. 45)	1992				2,900,000
Census of the Philippines	1990	2657		689,000
Pilar Louapre. "El idioma español en las islas Filipinas, en el pasado y el presente" (p. 290)	1989				5%
Study by Rodolfo Bulatao	1973				5.1%
Census of the Philippines	1970		1,335,945 (3.6%)
Census of the Philippines	1960	558,634 (2.1%)
Census of the Philippines	1939	417,375 (2.6%)
Census of the Philippines	1918	757,463 (11.8%)
Census of the Philippines	1903	978,276 (14%)
Guillermo Gómez Rivera.	Between 1890–1940	10%	70%
Rafael Rodríguez Ponga. Origen y Connotación, Manila, 1960.	1891–1900	1,260,000 (14%)

In any case, many of these statistics are biased and tend to be based on historical data for Spanish; for example, during the 1950s–70s it was said that 3% of Filipinos were Spanish speakers; on the other hand, older statistics tended to count the creole (Chavacano) as Spanish.

The reality is that the use of Spanish by people born after the Second World War is anecdotal; among those born before 1945 there is significant use, but this is a population group that decreases sharply year by year, now for reasons of natural death. It could be estimated, perhaps somewhat optimistically, that 10% of the population born before 1945 is able to communicate in Spanish, although almost all those born before that date are able to say a few phrases in Spanish. Bearing in mind that there are some 5 million Filipinos over 65, it is reasonable to think that those over 71 number one million, of whom, if 10% are able to communicate fluently in Spanish, at most some 100,000 Filipinos would be able to speak Spanish, not counting Chavacano speakers, a language too different to allow communication with Spanish. If we think of the historical 3–6%, we should lower the figure to 50,000; this figure of course does not count Filipinos who have learned Spanish academically but do not use it, nor have ever used it in their daily lives.

Teaching of Spanish

The main Filipino languages have in Spanish an important base of their vocabulary, reaching around 20% in some of them, which is why Spanish is considered an easy language to learn.

At least 41,000 people study Spanish in the country, according to the Instituto Cervantes. There are 13,500 students of Spanish in secondary school. To these must be added some 16,000 university students of Spanish, some 3,000 at the Instituto Cervantes, and finally some 11,500 in private centers. There is currently an Instituto Cervantes in Manila, but the teaching work of the Instituto Cervantes in Manila will be reinforced in the archipelago with the opening of three Aulas Cervantes in the cities of Zamboanga, Makati and Cebu.

The Instituto Cervantes of Manila and the Education Office of the Embassy of Spain in Manila, the Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language, as well as various groups of Hispanists, have launched a new wave promoting the learning of the Spanish language in the country. Among them is the former President of the Philippines Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The goal is to ensure that in this country, as has already been achieved in Brazil, Spanish can return to formal education, and even become an official language again.

However, for Spanish to return to compulsory education in public schools, the constitution would have to be amended, as was done in its day (on that occasion to abolish it) by the then President Corazon Aquino.

The former President of the Philippines Gloria Macapagal Arroyo asked the Government of Spain to collaborate in her efforts to reintroduce the language in that country's schools. After successive contacts between the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, the head of the Philippine Department of Education and the leadership of the Instituto Cervantes, in November 2008 the Government of the Philippines announced with great fanfare the reincorporation of Spanish into secondary education by mid-2009. This announcement was interpreted by many official bodies and media as the return of Spanish to public schools in the Philippines. Even in more sensationalist media there was talk of an unusual resurgence of interest in Spanish in the Philippines and of a hypothetical return of Spanish to official status in that country. What is clear is that new prospects opened up for the Spanish language in the Philippines. In 2009, the academic and Filipino President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was awarded the Don Quixote International Prize, for introducing the teaching of the Spanish language into the national curricula.

The restoration of Spanish in public education in the Philippines began in June 2009, but the process has not been fast. The project began with a pilot test in which the Instituto Cervantes of Manila was in charge of training 34 teachers during the two preceding months with an intensive 240-hour course, continuing their training online throughout the school year. These teachers gave the first classes to the 1,190 students selected for the project, in 17 schools, one in each province.

Spanish is currently the second most studied European language in the Philippines. In secondary education, the subject of Spanish is taught in the third and fourth years in a total of 82 public schools in the 2018–2019 school year, distributed across the 17 administrative regions of the Philippines.

On September 11, 2012, the Filipino Secretary of the Department of Education, Armin Luistro, announced an agreement with the Chilean government to teach Spanish to Filipino schoolteachers.

The Spanish used in the Philippines

Because the Philippines was administered by the Viceroyalty of New Spain during the viceregal period, Philippine Castilian (Cebuano: Katsilang Filipinhon; Filipino: Kastilang Filipino) has a greater affinity with the Mexican standard than with the European one. For example, seseo is hegemonic. However, vosotros is used and lleísmo is observed.

Today there is a tendency among the new generations of speakers (that is, those who learn the language as a foreign language) to employ grammatical and lexical features closer to the European standard. This is due to the confluence of the presence of the Instituto Cervantes and the disappearance of the native standard. Despite this, variations, above all in pronunciation and intonation, abound.

Hispanic cultural relations

Location of Spain and the Philippines.

At present, the culture of the Spanish language in the Philippines is championed by the Instituto Cervantes. One of its reading initiatives meant that, between March and August 2009, the Manila metro carried printed on its trains poems in English and Spanish by fifteen Spanish, Filipino and Hispanic American poets.

An important advance in relations between the Philippines and the rest of the Hispanic countries has been the participation of the Philippines in the Ibero-American summits since 2009, as an associate member.

Within popular culture, there are some successful singers and musical groups in Spanish, such as: Luis Eduardo Aute, Josh Santana, Antonio Morales, Conchita Panadés, Bambú, Isabel Granada, Imago, Miguel Morales, Pilita Corrales, Asin, Pupil, Yano and Sponge Cola.

Every June 30 the Philippine–Spanish Friendship Day is celebrated, which seeks to recover the historical and sociocultural links existing between Spain and the Philippines, among them the language.

Spanish-language literary prizes in the Philippines

• The Zóbel Prize, founded in 1920, is the oldest literary prize established in the Philippines. It was last awarded in 2000 as the "Hispanidad Prize" and since that date the prize has been dormant.

One of the most active social centers, as its statutes state:

to strengthen and maintain Hispano-Filipino relations in order to preserve the existing Spanish culture and the ideals of Hispanidad in the Philippines.

is the Casino Español de Manila, created in 1844, where the Zóbel Prizes are awarded.

• The José Rizal Prize for Filipino Letters, founded in 2015 by the Juan Andrés Institute of Comparative Studies and Globalization. Awarded in its first edition to Guillermo Gómez Rivera for Quis ut Deus, an anthropological and political novel that is a memoir of Filipino culture.

• The Rafael Palma Prize, founded in 2019 by the University of the Philippines and the Revista Filipina, a literary prize for Filipino students.

• The Antonio Abad Prize.

Spanish-language media

During the first decade of the 21st century there was a radio program on the Filipino state broadcaster BBS, called Filipinas, Ahora Mismo, which broadcast 1 hour daily in Spanish (Monday to Friday), on 6 local stations, from March 2007. There was also, for some years of the 21st century, a digital newspaper in Spanish called e-dyario., which in the end is no longer published today. Since 1997 there has been the electronic publication Revista Filipina, founded and directed by Edmundo Farolán and currently directed by Edwin Lozada.

On September 15, 2020, a new online magazine, La Jornada Filipina, was launched, founded by Arvyn Cerezo.

A phenomenon that is bursting in with force is the broadcasting of Hispanic American telenovelas in Spanish.

There are daily television news programs in the Chavacano language.

See also

• Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language
• Education in the Philippines during Spanish rule
• Filipinism
• Chavacano language
• Languages of the Philippines
• Waray language
• Spanish immigration to the Philippines
• Mexican immigration to the Philippines
• Philippine literature in Spanish
• Revista Filipina
• Juan Andrés Institute of Comparative Studies and Globalization
• Humanism-Europe Research Group
• José Rizal Prize for Filipino Letters
• Rafael Palma Prize

Notes

García Castellón, Manuel. Estampas y cuentos de la Filipinas Hispánica (An anthology of Filipino prose in Castilian). Madrid: Editorial Clan, 2002.

External links

• Instituto Cervantes of Manila
• Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language
• Documentary "El Idioma Español en Filipinas" by Javier Ruescas
• Signing of an agreement to make Spanish a co-official language in the Philippines (2010)
• Spanish-language publications of the Philippines
• El Castellano. Website of the Spanish Language
• The persecution of the official use of the Spanish language in the Philippines
• Vindication of Spanish in the Philippines
• Statistics of the Spanish Language in the Philippines
• Tagalog words of Spanish origin
• Pero ¿cuántos hablan español en Filipinas? Archived 2008-10-10 at the Wayback Machine
• The Teaching of Spanish (in English)
• Revista Filipina
• Education in the Philippines during the colonial period