GENDER IN LANGUAGE PROJECT
TAGALOG
SPEAKERS: 82,312,160¹
Tagalog is a language of the Philippines. The Tagalog language is the basis of Pilipino², which is largely recognized to be a standardized form of Tagalog. Pilipino and English share co-official language status in the region. Throughout history, Tagalog has been highly influenced by other languages like Malay, Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, and English as a result of trade and colonization.
Natively, Tagalog has masculine-feminine gender distinctions in some kinship terms (e.g. ama 'father', ina 'mother'). While the language did not have a system of morphological gender prior to Spanish colonialism, hundreds of Spanish loanwords were borrowed into Tagalog, many of which retained inflectional Spanish gender morphology, constituting a subset of the lexicon with morphological gender. Some of these items, including pilipino/pilipina, are especially prominent in the language and have been neutralized by speakers using the -x morpheme (pilipinx).
GENDER-INCLUSIVE PROPOSALS
MASCULINE
FEMININE
INCLUSIVE—X
pilipino, filipino
'Filipino'
pinoy
'Filipino'
pilipina, filipina
'Filipina'
pinay
'Filipina'
pilipinx, filipinx
'Filipinx'
pinxy
'Filipinx'
These two masculine-feminine pairs of Tagalog words have been neutralized using the -x morpheme by various speakers. As in Spanish, where the -x is similarly a gender-inclusive morpheme, it has been attested as the cluster [ks], producing the variable pronunciations [fi.li.'pi.nɛks]/[pi.li.'pi.nɛks] and ['pi.nksi]. Use of the -x morpheme is most prominently proposed and explained by the organization Filipinxs in Education Reaffirming Community Empowerment (FIERCE). In 2020, filipinx and pinxy were added to the English-language resource Dictionary.com.
GRAMMAR OF GENDER IN TAGALOG
by CARMELA BLAZADO & BEN PAPADOPOULOS
This resource displays all sites of masculine-feminine gender distinction in the Tagalog grammar. It does not display parts of the Tagalog grammar that do not have gendered distinctions. The first two sections feature examples of native Tagalog words with masculine-feminine gender distinctions. The last two sections feature examples of Spanish loanwords in Tagalog that have masculine-feminine gender distinctions. Expanded versions of these lists may be seen in the linked resource Spanish Loanwords in Tagalog.
NATIVE LEXICAL
GENDER ITEMS
MASCULINE
FEMININE
ama
'father'
kuya
'older brother'
bayaw
'brother-in-law'
ina
'mother'
ate
'older sister'
hipag
'sister-in-law'
NATIVE HONORIFICS
MASCULINE
FEMININE
G.
ginoo
'mister (Mr.)'
Gng.
ginang
'missus (Mrs.)'
SPANISH LOANWORDS
IN TAGALOG WITH MORPHOLOGICAL GENDER
MASCULINE
FEMININE
direktór
'director'
iho
'son'
pilipino, filipino
'Filipino'
direktóra
'director'
iha
'daughter'
pilipina, filipina
'Filipina'
SPANISH LOANWORDS
IN TAGALOG WITH
LEXICAL GENDER
MASCULINE
FEMININE
aktór
'actor'
duke
'duke'
padrastro, padrasto
'stepfather'
aktrís
'actress'
dukesa
'dutchess'
madrasta
'stepmother'
NOTES
1. This figure takes into account the L1 and L2 speaker counts for both Tagalog and Pilipino listed by Ethnologue.
2. The orthographic forms filipino/pilipino and filipina/pilipina covary.
CITE THIS PAGE
APA 7
Blazado, C. & Papadopoulos, B. (2022). Tagalog. Gender in Language Project. www.genderinlanguage.com/tagalog
REFERENCES
Baklanova, E. (2016). On marginal gender in Tagalog: A case study. In Y. Narodov Mira (Ed.), Proceedings on the XII International Conference: Languages of the Far East, South East Asia and Western Africa (pp. 25-33).
Baklanova, E. (2017). Types of borrowings in Tagalog/Filipino. Kritika Kultura, 28, 35-54.
Constantino, P. C. (2000). Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino: Do they differ?. Defenders of Indigenous Languages of the Archipelago. http://dila.ph/FilipinoisnotTagalog.pdf
Dictionary.com. (2020). Dictionary.com releases its biggest update ever. Dictionary.com. http://www.dictionary.com/e/new-words-dictionary-2020/
Filipinxs in Education Reaffirming Community Empowerment [FIERCE]. (2018). Why we say 'filipinx'. Filipinxs in Education Reaffirming Community Empowerment. http://kpfierce.weebly.com/blog/why-we-say-filipinx
Oficina de Educación Iberoamericana. (1972). Hispanismos en el tagalo. Madrid: Imnasa.
Stolz, T. (2012). Survival in a niche: On gender-copy in Chamorro (and sundry languages). In M. Vanhove, T. Stolz, & A. Urdze (Eds.), Morphologies in Contact (pp. 93-140). Akademie Verlag.