# Stigma of tagalog/Filipino and other creole languages **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [August 28, 2023, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229 "2023-08-28T14:53:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/61 "2023-08-29T15:47:34Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > There is also the possibility of promoting a real language like Tlingit; then nobody would accuse you of being too Euro-centric or Chinese-centric. Or we could make Pirahã the new world language. It’s a language of about 300 speakers in the Amazon basin. You can find information about it in the Wikipedia entry for it. If it really is as different from any remotely well-known language as it’s claimed to be, then everybody who learns it will have their mind blown by how strange it is. And after it becomes the native language of everyone in the world, we’ll have people complaining about how Pirahã-centric the world has become. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/62 "2023-08-29T15:56:10Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > You are right about Hebrew being a liturgical language. Interestingly enough, I remember reading that not all Catholic cardinals are fluent in Latin, or as fluent as they should be. Even today you can say that about Hebrew and a lot of Jews. Even without a rabbi there’s an expectation of being able to read and recite Hebrew for worship services - that’s sort of the _point_ of the bar/bat mitzvah, that’s the first time the child/young adult is allowed to read the Torah at the Sabbath services - but ever since Ancient Hebrew fell out of use as a daily language there have been Jews far from fluent in its use, even when ritually required. I wonder if the OP thinks there has to be a discrete number, a critical mass of people to keep a language alive. Well, more than a handful, sure. But it doesn’t take _millions_ of people to keep a language alive, just people who use it every day, or nearly so, and who pass it on in sufficient numbers to keep doing so. A concentration of speakers is a big help - some small language nonetheless hang on because there are _enough_ people learning them in villages or on islands or what have you. There are only about 310,000 speakers of Icelandic in the world, but the language seems to be doing fine given that so many of those people live on one island where it’s the official language, there continues to be instruction and publication in the language, and the population at large, and while almost all able to converse in another language (English being, for example, also a mandatory study in school) seem to have an active interest in preserving Icelandic. The modern internet has resulted in a type of competition unknown to Iceland prior to the last 50 years, but it also allows Icelanders to produce their own content as well. But, an important point is that Icelandic has trundled along for 1,000 years with fewer than 400,000 speaker all that time. Contrast this to Tagalog, which has at least 28 _million_ speakers (I’ve seen estimated up to 80 million, but that gets into “what is fluent”? “Who can use this language at all?” and “what’s a dialect?”) Tagalog will, eventually, like all languages either die out or mutate into something else, but with that many speakers and no impending likelihood of being conquered, invaded, or wiped out entirely by a natural catastrophe I expect it to endure for many more generations to come, even if the numbers continue to be reduced. Again, compare to Hebrew - it was preserved as a liturgical language for something like 2,500 years despite being “dead”. So it was saved in one sense, but because the people using it were so dispersed they would up making more use of the languages of those they lived among than of their national/ethnic language. It took concentrating Jews into one spot to revive the language. On the other hand, the Romani (“gypsy”) language, spoken currently by about 3.5 million people, is in real danger of dying out because its speakers are very dispersed. The result has been a lot of Romani just not being fluent in it, creolization with other languages, and less use of it in daily life even if it does have some _ligua franca_ used at Romani gatherings. So even though Romani has an order of magnitude more speakers, it’s in far more danger than Icelandic. It’s not _just_ about the sheer numbers. It also how concentrated they are, whether or not they were colonized (Iceland wasn’t, so Icelandic never suffered socially on the island the way that, say, Irish Gaelic - another island language - did under the British Empire), educational level, whether or not and how much the people value their language, and a bunch of other factors. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/63 "2023-08-29T15:59:14Z")
I remember seeing an article that talked about when the state of Israel was formed, there was a decision made to make Hebrew the official language and not Yiddish, which some communities already spoke. I think the article was about how some people were trying to preserve books and such that were published in Yiddish. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/64 "2023-08-29T16:14:48Z")
That would have been a big “fuck you” to non-Ashkenazi Jews, Arabs, and Palestinians, all of whom face enough discrimination in Israel, so not sure if it was seriously considered. However, this issue came to a head much earlier, as I said with the establishment of cornerstone universities in Israel in the early 1900s, and I heard that a combination of German (not Yiddish) and Arabic was proposed, before Hebrew was ultimately chosen as a medium of instruction. In fact a lot of Hebrew vocabulary had to be calqued, borrowed, or otherwise constructed to discuss mathematics, engineering, chemistry, botany, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/65 "2023-08-29T16:22:25Z")
Yiddish was the language of the Ashkenazim, the Jews of Eastern Europe and is a form of German heavily influenced by Hebrew. The Jews of Spain/Western Europe used Ladino, again, a Latin language heavily influenced by Hebrew and, if I recall, Arabic. Meanwhile, Jews that had never left the Middle East were speaking other languages (Arabic, Persian Jews spoke Persian, etc.). Ethiopian Jews spoke languages like Qwara and Kayla, from the regions in which they were living. Pull all of those groups together into Modern Israel and while to many Ashkenazim “Let’s speak Yiddish!” seemed a sensible solution there were all those _other_ Jews for who Yiddish was not only a foreign language but in some cases in an entirely unfamilar language family who weren’t so enthused. Hebrew was the language they all had in common (well, the Ethiopians used Ge’ez, which is at least related), even if some were quite weak in its use. Either that, or try to come up with a language acceptable to everyone which just wasn’t going to happen, really. These days Modern Israel is only about 32% Eastern European/Ashkenazi Jews. The Sephardi Jews are about 55% of the population. What skews a lot of American/Anglophone viewpoints is that _in the US_ about **90-95%** of Jews are Ashkenazi - thus, the perceptions of many Americans is that Jew=Ashkenazi=Jew without realizing there are significant historical, linguistic, and cultural differences with other Jewish communities around the world. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/66 "2023-08-29T16:32:15Z")
In the Philippines, besides other problems there is the ongoing conflict with the New People’s Army and the “People’s Democratic Government”. Question is, do the rebels have any expressed language policy? ---
**Author:** ![Jagraze1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jagraze1/32/14870_2.png) [@Jagraze1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jagraze1)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/67 "2023-08-29T17:04:34Z")
Thank you! ---
**Author:** ![Beckdawrek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beckdawrek/32/3647_2.png) [@Beckdawrek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beckdawrek)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/68 "2023-08-29T18:55:17Z")
@Jagraze1 , can you speak any of these languages you are so concerned with? Learning some may be a thing you can do to understanding them better. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/69 "2023-08-29T22:23:24Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > It might even be _less_ a creole than English is - the Norman Invasion had major impacts on the language spoken in England, not just vocabulary but also grammar, it’s when English lost nearly all of its grammatical gender, for example. English got a double dose of influence since it was invaded by the Norse who lived in Scandinavia (twice), and then got invaded by the Norse who spoke French (it may have been the first invasions that knocked off the grammatical gender (I recall something to that effect anyway)). > [@Yllaria](#): > > This is only an anecdote, but my co-workers who speak Tagalog are all thoroughly bilingual or trilingual. They speak Tagalog at home and when among other Tagalog speakers, but are completely comfortable speaking English at work and some of them do Spanish translation when needed. It’s a bit hard to judge though, since an English-speaker (as you are) is more likely to work with people who also speak English as a second (or third) language. But it worth mentioning that after the Norman conquest, many English were bilingual (English and French) or if highly educated, trilingual (English, French and Latin) - but English survived quite nicely, even though there were considerably fewer English speakers then, than there are Tagalog speakers today. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/70 "2023-08-29T23:27:48Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > It’s a bit hard to judge though, since an English-speaker (as you are) is more likely to work with people who also speak English as a second (or third) language. Definitely. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/71 "2023-08-29T23:58:30Z")
> [@engineer\_comp\_geek](#): > > As for the reference to googling, while there is no rule specifically against that in MPSIMS (that rule only applies to FQ), when used in this manner it comes off as a pretty clear threadshit. That was me… sorry! And I agree with learning other languages. I’ve certainly been able to see things from different perspectives with each language I learn, and I get the same effect from practicing a language that I’m a beginner at (I swear I can actually feel new neural pathways being built in my brain when I’m learning or even speaking in a new language). ---
**Author:** ![Jagraze1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jagraze1/32/14870_2.png) [@Jagraze1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jagraze1)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2024, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/72 "2024-01-15T20:39:30Z")
Guys! Please forgive me! I’m so sorry! ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b77776/32.png) [@Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_was_in_Saudi)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/73 "2024-01-16T00:19:50Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > Tagalog is classified as a language within the Austronesian language group. Not a creole. Not a bastardisation of Spanish. Yep. A language with the advantage of phonetic spelling. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/74 "2024-01-16T00:39:50Z")
> [@JohnM](#): > > What is your source for considering Tagalog a creole? While it contains a large number of loan words from other austronesian languages as well as English and Spanish, by that criterion you’d have to classify modern English as a creole as well. Whether modern English should be considered a creole is debatable, but there is no question that middle English was a creole of Anglo-Saxon and French. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/75 "2024-01-16T00:45:16Z")
Yes there is. There was a huge influx of French lexicon, but other than the weakening of Germanic inflexions, I don’t see how there’s much grammatical influence from French, and the core vocabulary is still Germanic. I think saying that Middle English was creolized or partially creolized is more accurate than saying that it was a creole. ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/76 "2024-01-16T04:55:51Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > Yes there is. There was a huge influx of French lexicon, but other than the weakening of Germanic inflexions, I don’t see how there’s much grammatical influence from French, and the core vocabulary is still Germanic. I think saying that Middle English was creolized or partially creolized is more accurate than saying that it was a creole On the other hand, Old English grammar did make one notable change under the influence of Old Norse; it shed its original third-person plural pronouns _hie, heom_ and _heora_, and adopted instead the corresponding Old Norse pronouns _þei,_ _þeim_ , and _þeirra_, which it retains as “they”, “them”, and “their”. It’s very unusual for languages to change fundamental function words of this nature. > [@Broomstick](#): > > But it should be noted that Hebrew is a “zombie” language, back from the dead. I’m told there are notable differences between “Biblical Hebrew” and “Modern Hebrew”, to the point that when it comes to instruction they are offered separately. A Modern Hebrew speaker _might_ be able to follow a conversation in Ancient Hebrew, especially with a little practice, but the Modern version is so chock-ful of new terms and influences from other current languages someone from 500 BCE probably wouldn’t understand what the modern person is saying. In college, I studied Biblical Hebrew under a professor called Ted Lewis, who was an expert in ancient Near Eastern and Semitic languages; he read Ugaritic, Phoenician, Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Proto-Semitic; pretty much any language spoken in the ancient Near East. At one phase of his career, he was invited to spend a year in Israel, teaching at a university. He told us the story of being put into a language class, to become comfortable with spoken modern Hebrew. He was first given a written exam, to test his knowledge of Hebrew grammar. Being completely fluent in Biblical Hebrew, he crushed the exam, which resulted in the university putting him in the highest level of class. Where he was utterly lost, as his ability to fluently read and write Ancient Hebrew did not in the least translate to understanding and speaking Modern Hebrew. He said he stuck it out for a couple of days before going to the instructors and asking to be reassigned to a lower level class. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/77 "2024-01-16T12:45:52Z")
> [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](#): > > Old English grammar did make one notable change under the influence of Old Norse; Yep. English is a creole of Old English with Old Norse, with a Norman French overlay. The vast simplification of case endings is due to the Anglo-Norse combo. I’m not sure why American education often skips the Norse influence, maybe because only specialists can determine which pieces are English and which are Norse, while it’s easy to find the French. Whether it’s a full creole or partially through the process depends on the exact definitions. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2024, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/78 "2024-01-17T00:07:14Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > Yes there is. There was a huge influx of French lexicon, but other than the weakening of Germanic inflexions, I don’t see how there’s much grammatical influence from French, and the core vocabulary is still Germanic. I think saying that Middle English was creolized or partially creolized is more accurate than saying that it was a creole. Granted the core vocabulary is basically Germanic. But two grammatical changes seem to come from French. First the -s plural, which is hardly ever used in German. But mainly the change from SOV (subject object verb) to SVO, which is really a major reorganization. Yes, German looks SVO in simple sentences. But as soon as there is an auxiliary, it reverts to SOV. And subordinate clauses are always SOV. Curiously English uses preposed adjectives, which generally go with SOV languages. French, of course, usually has its adjectives following the noun, which is normal for an SVO language. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2024, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/79 "2024-01-17T00:21:48Z")
Interesting. I don’t think -s as a plural comes from Romance—it’s already there in quite a few Old English nouns, and all it has to do is spread by analogy. But these things are complicated, and it makes sense to me that the one that matches Norman French is the one that spreads at the expense of the ones that don’t. Further, French final /s/ seems to have been lost by the time French got to England ([Phonological history of French - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French)). The word order is interesting, but since Latin wasn’t SVO but shifted in becoming French, and Old English wasn’t SVO but shifted in becoming English, and there’s a Celtic substrate that wasn’t originally VSO but ended up that way, it seems like this entire branch of Indo-European is prone to these major reorganizations. Plus, SVO is already there in main clauses in Old English, so it’s something the language already had. I don’t even know how to begin finding a cite, though, and it’s an intriguing idea. ---
**Author:** ![zimaane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a3d4f5/32.png) [@zimaane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zimaane)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2024, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229/80 "2024-01-17T21:46:06Z")
From what I’ve read the regularization of the plural in English was due more to the Viking invasions than the Normans. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stigma-of-tagalog-filipino-and-other-creole-languages/989229.md?page=5)