Filipino people

Epifanio de los Santos Manuel Tinio
1st row: Corazon Aquino · Emilio Aguinaldo · Lorenzo Ruiz · Manny Pacquiao 2nd row: Julian Felipe · Andrés Bonifacio · Carlos P. Romulo · Mutya Buena 3rd row: Ramon Magsaysay · Juan Luna · Epifanio de los Santos · Imelda Marcos 4th row: Ferdinand Marcos · Charlene Gonzales · Mariano Gómez · Lea Salonga 5th row: Manuel Tinio · Melchora Aquino · Benigno Aquino III · Lakandula 6th row: Manuel L. Quezon · José Rizal · Lapu-Lapu
Total population
105,000,000[1]
Regions with significant populations
Philippines 94,000,000[2]  United States 3,416,840[3]  Saudi Arabia 1,066,401[4]  Malaysia 636,544[5]  United Arab Emirates 529,114[4]  Canada 436,190[6]  Japan 305,972[7]  United Kingdom 203,035[4]  Mexico 200,000  Qatar 195,558[4]  Kuwait 139,802[4]  Italy 134,154[8]  Hong Kong 130,810[9]  Australia 129,400[10]  Taiwan 74,483[11]  Israel 70,000[12]  South Korea 63,464[13]  Spain 40,000[14]  New Zealand 16,938[15]  Nigeria  Norway 12,262[16]  Netherlands 12,000[17]  Pakistan 3,000[18]
Languages
Philippine languages, English; Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Lan-nang
Religion
Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism), Islam, Buddhism, Traditional and folk religions, or other religions.
Related ethnic groups
other Southeast Asians and Austronesian-speaking people.

The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 94 million Filipinos in the Philippines,^[19] and about 11 million living outside the Philippines.^[20]

There are around 180 languages spoken in the Philippines, most of them belonging to the Austronesian language family, with Tagalog and Cebuano having the greatest number of native speakers.^[21] The official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and English and most Filipinos are bilingual or trilingual.^[22][23]

Most Filipinos refer to themselves colloquially as "Pinoy" (feminine: "Pinay"), which is a slang word formed by taking the last four letters of "Pilipino" and adding the diminutive suffix "-y". The lack of the letter "F" in the pre-1987 Philippine alphabet, Abakada, had caused the letter "F" to be substituted with "P". This is why, when the 28-letter modern Filipino alphabet was made official in 1987, the name Filipino was preferred over Pilipino. The name Filipino was chosen by the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, who named the islands "las Islas Filipinas" ("the Philippine Islands") after Philip II of Spain.^[24]

In colloquial speech, English language words borrowed from the Filipino language are inflected for gender. It is quite unnatural, for example, for women to call themselves Filipino in daily conversation and they will generally refer to themselves instead as Filipina. Also, adjectives that have to do with women (e.g. "Filipina beauty") are modified to use the feminine form. In legal documents such as bank accounts and passports, however, both genders are referred to as Filipino.

History[link]

Pre – Colonial[link]

In 2010, a metatarsal from "Callao Man" discovered in 2007 was dated through uranium-series dating as being 67,000 years old.^[25]

Prior to that, the earliest human remains found in the Philippines were thought to be the fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone, discovered in the 1960s by Dr. Robert B. Fox, an anthropologist from the National Museum.^[26] Anthropologists who examined these remains agreed that they belonged to modern human beings. These include the Homo sapiens, as distinguished from the mid-Pleistocene Homo erectus species.

The "Tabon Man" fossils are considered to have come from a third group of inhabitants, who worked the cave between 22,000 and 20,000 BCE. An earlier cave level lies so far below the level containing cooking fire assemblages that it must represent Upper Pleistocene dates like 45 or 50 thousand years ago.^[27] Researchers say this indicates that the human remains were pre-Mongoloid, from about 40,000 years ago. Mongoloid is the term which anthropologists applied to the ethnic group which migrated to Southeast Asia during the Holocene period and evolved into the Austronesian people (associated with the Haplogroup O1 (Y-DNA) genetic marker), a group of Malayo-Polynesian-speaking people including those from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Malagasy, the non-Han Chinese Taiwanese Aboriginals.^[28]

Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano of the University of the Philippines, in 2001 postulates that the present indigenous Filipinos are products of the long process of evolution and movement of people.^[29]

A page from the Boxer Codex showing a Filipino couple bedecked in gold thread. The use of Gold as jewelry and household purposes was common in any social castes of the pre-colonial Filipino society.

Fluctuations in ancient shorelines between 150,000 BP and 17,000 BP connected to the Malay Archipelago region with Maritime Southeast Asia and the Philippines. This may have enabled ancient migrations into the Philippines from Maritime Southeast Asia approximately 50,000 BP to 13,000 BP.^[30]

A January 2009 study of language phylogenies by R. D. Gray at UCLA published in Science (journal), suggests that the population expansion of Austronesian peoples was triggered by rising sea levels of the Sunda shelf at the end of the last ice age in a two-pronged expansion, which moved north through the Philippines and into Taiwan, while a second expansion prong spread east along the New Guinea coast and into Oceania and Polynesia.^[31]

The Negritos are likely descendants of the indigenous populations of the Sunda landmass and New Guinea, predating the Mongoloid peoples who later entered Southeast Asia.^[32] Multiple studies also show that Negritos from Southeast Asia to New Guinea share a closer cranial affinity with Australo-Melanesians.^[32][33] They were the ancestors of such tribes of the Philippines as the Aeta, Agta, Ayta, Ati, Dumagat and other tribes of the Philippines, today making up .03% of the total Philippine population.^[34]

The majority of present day Filipinos are a product of the long process of evolution and movement of people.^[35] After the mass migrations through land bridges, migrations continue by boat during the maritime era of South East Asia. The ancient races became homogenized into the Malayo-Polynesians which colonized the majority of the Philippine, Malaysian and Indonesian Archipelagos.^[29]

Since at least the 3rd century, various ethnic groups established several communities. These were formed by the assimilation of various native Philippine kingdoms.^[34] South Asian and East Asian people together with the people of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, traded with Filipinos and introduced and passed Hinduism and Buddhism to the native tribes of the Philippines. Most of these people stayed in the Philippines where they were slowly absorbed into the local society.

Many of the barangay (tribal municipalities) were, to a varying extent, under the de-jure jurisprudence of one of several neighboring empires, among them the Malay Sri Vijaya, Javanese Majapahit, Brunei, Melaka, Indian Chola, Persia, Arabia, Seljuq/Turkish Ottoman, Greece, Funan, Champa, and Khmer empires, although de-facto had established their own independent system of rule. Trading links with Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Malay Peninsula, Indochina, China, India, Arabia, Japan and the Ryukyu Kingdom flourished during this era. A thalassocracy had thus emerged based on international trade.

Even scattered barangays, through the development of inter-island and international trade, became more culturally homogeneous by the 4th century. Hindu-Buddhist culture and religion flourished among the noblemen in this era.

In the period between the 7th to the beginning of the 15th centuries, numerous prosperous centers of trade had emerged, including the Kingdom of Namayan which flourished alongside Manila Bay,^[36][36][37] Cebu, Iloilo,^[38] Butuan, the Kingdom of Sanfotsi situated in Pangasinan, the Kingdom of Luzon now known as Pampanga which specialized in trade with China, Japan and the Kingdom of Ryukyu in Okinawa, and most of what is now known as South East Asia.

From the 9th century onwards, a large number of Arab traders from the Middle East settled in the Malay Archipelago and intermarried with the local Malay, Indonesian, and Filipino populations.^[39]

The Laguna Copperplate Inscription: The oldest known legal document from the Dynasty of Tondo.

In the years leading up to 1000 C.E., there were already several maritime societies existing in the islands but there was no unifying political state encompassing the entire Philippine archipelago. Instead, the region was dotted by numerous semi-autonomous barangays (settlements ranging is size from villages to city-states) under the sovereignty of competing thalassocracies ruled by datus, rajahs or sultans^[40] or by upland agricultural societies ruled by "petty plutocrats". States such as the Kingdom of Maynila and Namayan, the Dynasty of Tondo, the Confederation of Madyaas, the rajahnates of Butuan and Cebu and the sultanates of Maguindanao and Sulu existed alongside the highland societies of the Ifugao and Mangyan.^{[41][42][43][44]} Some of these regions were part of the Malayan empires of Srivijaya, Majapahit and Brunei.^[45][46][47]

By the 13th century, Arab and Indian Missionaries/Traders from Malaysia and Indonesia brought Islam to the Philippines, where it both replaced and was practiced together with indigenous religions. Most indigenous tribes of the Philippines practiced a mixture of Animism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Native villages, called barangays were populated by locals called Timawa (Middle Class/ freemen) and Alipin (servants & slaves). They were ruled by Rajahs, Datus and Sultans, a class called Maginoo (royals) and defended by the Maharlika (Lesser nobles, royal warriors and aristocrats).^[34] These Royals and Nobles are descended from native Filipinos with varying degrees of Indo-aryan, East Asian, Dravidian, Arab and even Greek ancestry which is evident in today's DNA analysis among South East Asian Royals who mostly claim their ancestry from the Alexandrian Era. This tradition continued among the Spanish and Portuguese traders who also intermarried with the local populations.^[48]

Colonial influence[link]

A mestiza de sangley woman in a photograph by Francisco Van Camp, c. 1875.

The arrival of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 began a period of European colonization. During the period of Spanish colonialism beginning in the 16th century, the Philippines was governed by Mexico City on behalf of the Spanish Empire. Early Spanish settlers were mostly explorers, soldiers, government officials and religious missionaries born in Spain and Mexico. Most Spaniards who settled were of Andalusian ancestry but there were also Catalonian, Moorish and Basque settlers. The Peninsulares (governors born in Spain), mostly of Castilian ancestry, settled in the islands to govern their territory. Most settlers married the daughters of rajahs, datus and sultans (chieftains) to reinforce the colonization of the islands. The Ginoo and Maharlika castes (royals and nobles) in the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish formed the privileged Principalia (nobility) during the Spanish period. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands of Japanese traders also migrated to the Philippines and assimilated into the local population.^[49]

A caricature of General Marcelo Azcárraga Palmero taken from the Catalan newspaper la Campana de Gràcia. He became the only Spanish prime minister of Filipino descent.

As a part of the Seven years war, the British forces occupied Manila between 1762 and 1764. However, the only part of the Philippines which the British held was the Spanish colonial capital of Manila and the principal naval port Cavite, both of which are located on Manila Bay. The war was ended by the Treaty of Paris (1763). At the end of the war the treaty signatories were not aware that Manila had been taken by the British and was being administered as a British colony. Consequently, no specific provision was made for the Philippines. Instead they fell under the general provision that all other lands not otherwise provided for be returned to the Spanish Empire.^[50] Many Indian Sepoy troops and their British captains mutinied and were left in Manila and some parts of the Ilocos and Cagayan. The ones in Manila settled at Cainta, Rizal and the ones at the north settled at Isabela. Most were assimilated into the local population.

The arrival of the Spaniards to the Philippines attracted new waves of immigrants from China, and maritime trade flourished during the Spanish period. The Spanish recruited thousands of Chinese migrant workers called sangleys to build the colonial infrastructure in the islands. Most Chinese immigrants converted to Christianity, intermarried with the locals, and adopted Hispanized names and customs and became fully assimilated. The children of unions between Filipinos and Chinese that became fully assimilated were designated in official records as mestizos de sangley but viewed themselves as Filipinos. The Chinese mestizos were largely confined to the Binondo area until the 19th century. However, they eventually spread all over the islands, and became traders, moneylenders and landowners.

A total of 110 Manila-Acapulco galleons set sail between 1565 to 1815, during the Philippines trade with Mexico. Until 1593, three or more ships would set sail annually from each port. European criollos, mestizos and mulattos of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Mexican descent from the Americas, mostly from Latin America came in contact with the Filipinos. Japanese, Indian and Cambodian Christians who fled from religious persecutions and killing fields also settled in the Philippines during the 17th until the 19th centuries.

With the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1867, Spain opened the Philippines for international trade. European investors such as British, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Russian, Italian and French were among those who settled in the islands as business increased. More Spaniards arrived during the next century. Many of these European migrants intermarried with local mestizos and some assimilated with the indigenous population. Their enterprises became the precursors of the current Chinese and oriental dominated major corporations and conglomerates of the country.

Water carriers in Iloilo, 1899.

After the defeat of Spain during the Spanish-American War in 1898, Filipino general, Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence on 12 June while general Wesley Merritt became the first American governor of the Philippines. On 10 December 1898, the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war, with Spain ceding the Philippines and other colonies to the United States in exchange for $20 million dollars.^[51][52] After the Philippine–American War, the United States civil governance was established in 1901, with William Howard Taft as the first American Governor-General.^[53] A number of Americans settled in the islands and thousands of interracial marriages between Americans and Filipinos have taken place since then. Due to the strategic location of the Philippines, as many as 21 bases and 100,000 military personnel were stationed there since the United States first colonized the islands in 1898. These bases were decommissioned in 1992 after the end of the Cold War, but left behind thousands of Amerasian children.^[54] The country gained independence from the United States in 1946. The Pearl S. Buck International Foundation estimates there are 52,000 Amerasians scattered throughout the Philippines. In addition, numerous Filipino men enlisted in the US Navy and made careers in it, often settling with their families in the United States. Some of their second or third generation-families returned to the country.

Filipino students from Lamitan.

Following its independence, the Philippines has seen both small and large-scale immigration into the country, mostly involving Americans, British, Europeans, and some Chinese and Japanese peoples. After WWII, South Asians continued to migrate into the islands. Most of which assimilated and avoided the local social stigma instilled by the early Spaniards against them by keeping a low profile and/or by trying to pass as Spanish mestizos. This was also true for the Chinese and Arab immigrants, majority of whom are also post WWII arrivals. More recent migrations into the country by Koreans, Persians, Brazilians, and other Southeast Asians have contributed to the enrichment of the country's ethnic landscape, language and culture. Centuries of migration, diaspora, assimilation, and cultural diversity made most Filipinos open-minded in embracing interracial marriage and multiculturalism. Philippine nationality law is currently based upon the principles of your place of birth or origin, and therefore descent from a parent who is a citizen of the Republic of the Philippines is the primary method of acquiring national citizenship. Birth in the Philippines to foreign parents does not in itself confer Philippine citizenship, although RA9139, the Administrative Naturalization Law of 2000, does provide a path for administrative naturalization of certain aliens born in the Philippines.

Filipinos of mixed ethnic origins are still referred to today as mestizos. However in common parlance, mestizos are only used to refer to Filipinos mixed with Spanish or any other European ancestry. Filipinos mixed with any foreign ethnicities are named depending on their predominant physical aspect.

Genetic studies[link]

Migration of the Austronesian peoples and their languages based on archeological studies.

A study by Leeds University and published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, showed that mitochondrial DNA lineages have been evolving within Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) since modern humans arrived approximately 50,000 years ago. Population dispersals occurred at the same time as sea levels rose, which resulted in migrations from the Philippine Islands to as far north as Taiwan within the last 10,000 years.^[55]

Filipinos are an Austronesian people, a linguistic and genetic group that includes other ethnicities from maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and the Pacific islands.^[56] Haplogroup O1a-M119 (labeled as "Haplogroup H" in this study), is commonly found among Filipinos and is shared with other Austronesian-speaking populations.^[57][58] After the 16th century, the colonial period saw the influx of limited genetic influence from Europeans and other populations from the Americas, Oceania, and Asia.

Filipinos also exhibit Sundadonty.^[59] The latter is regarded as having a more generalised morphology and having a longer ancestry than its offspring, Sinodonty. Dental morphology provides clues to prehistoric migration patterns, with Sinodont dental patterns occurring in East Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, and the Americas. Sundadont patterns occur in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia as well as Oceania.^[60] Filipinos are also one of the Austronesian ancestors of modern Oceanic populations, including the Māori people of New Zealand. The current predominant theory of Austronesian migrations holds that Austronesians are believed to have reached Oceania through successive southward and eastward migrations ultimately from Taiwan.^[61]

Languages[link]

Austronesian languages have been spoken in the Philippines for thousands of years. According to a recent study by Mark Donohue of the Australian National University and Tim Denham of Monash University, there is no linguistic evidence for an orderly north-to-south dispersal of the Austronesian languages from Taiwan through the Philippines and into Island Southeast Asia (ISEA).^[62] Many adopted words from Sanskrit were incorporated during the Indian cultural influence starting from the 5th century BC, in common with its Southeast Asian neighbours. Starting in the second half of the 16th century, Spanish was the official language of the country for the more than three centuries that the islands were governed through Mexico City on behalf of the Spanish Empire. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Spanish was the preferred language among Ilustrados and educated Filipinos in general. Significant disagreement exists, however, on the extent Spanish use beyond that. It has been argued that the Philippines were less hispanized than Canaries and America, with Spanish only being adopted by the ruling class involved in civil and judicial administration and culture. Spanish was the language of only approximately ten percent of the Philippine population when Spanish rule ended in 1898.^[63] As a lingua franca or creole language of Filipinos, major languages of the country like Chavacano, Cebuano, Tagalog, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Bicolano, Hiligaynon, and Ilocano assimilated many different words and expressions from Castilian Spanish.

In sharp contrast, another view is that the ratio of the population which spoke Spanish as their mother tongue in the last decade of Spanish rule was 10% or 14%.^[64] An additional 60% is said to have spoken Spanish as a second language until World War II.^[65] Various sources reported the widespread use of Spanish by the Philippine population, among them the secretary of education during the period of US rule, as well as Henry Ford, who reported what he observed and the Filipino speech that he heard in his travels through the archipelago, sixteen of whose provinces where said to be Spanish-speaking in 1906.^[64]

In 1863 a Spanish decree introduced universal education, creating free public schooling in Spanish.^[66] It was also the language of the Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Malolos Constitution proclaimed it as the "official language" of the First Philippine Republic. Spanish continued to be the predominant lingua franca used in the islands and formed a second language for most Filipinos before and during the American colonial regime. Following the American occupation of the Philippines and the imposition of English, the overall use of Spanish declined gradually, especially after the 1940s.

According to Ethnologue, there are about 180 languages spoken in the Philippines.^[67] The Constitution of the Philippines designates Filipino (which is based on Tagalog^[68][69]) as the national language and designates both Filipino and English as official languages. Regional languages are designated as auxiliary official languages. The constitution also provides that Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and optional basis.^[70]

Other Philippine languages in the country with at least 320,000 native speakers include Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray-Waray, Kapampangan, Chavacano (Spanish creole), Northern Bicol, Pangasinan, Southern Bicol, Maranao, Maguindanao, Kinaray-a, Tausug, Surigaonon, Masbatenyo, Aklanon, and Ibanag. The 28-letter modern Filipino alphabet, adopted in 1987, is the official writing system.^[71]

Religion[link]

Main article: Religion in the Philippines

A 2004 California wedding between a Filipina bride and a Nigerian groom.

Most Filipinos are Roman Catholics. About eighty percent of the total Filipino population follows the Roman Catholic faith. Historically, the ancient Filipinos were Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. The Spanish arrival converted a vast majority of the Filipinos to Roman Catholicism. There are also large groups of Protestants and members of the Iglesia ni Kristo, an independent branch of Christianity unique only to the Philippines. Five to ten percent of Filipinos still follow the Islamic religion. The Muslims in the Philippines are situated in southwestern Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. The Filipino Muslims call themselves the Moros, which is a Spanish word that refers to the Moors, a Muslim empire that had once ruled Spain. Although the Filipino Moros and Arab Moors have no cultural connection, other than following Islam. Indigenous groups like the Aeta are Animists. Four to five percent of Filipinos also follow the Buddhist religion. These are mostly the ethnic Chinese and Chinese-Filipinos living in Metro Manila.^[72]

Diaspora[link]

Filipinos form a minority ethnic group in the Americas, Europe, Oceania,^[73][74] the Middle East, and other countries in the world.

There are an estimated four million Americans of Filipino ancestry in the United States, and more than 300,000 American citizens in the Philippines.^[75]

Filipinos make up about half of the entire population of the Northern Marianas Islands, an American territory in the North Pacific Ocean, and a large proportion of the populations of Guam, Palau, and the Malaysian state of Sabah.^[74]

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: People of the Philippines

• Demographics of the Philippines
• Ethnic groups in the Philippines
• List of Filipinos
• List of Filipino athletes

Publications[link]

• Peter Bellwood (July 1991). "The Austronesian Dispersal and the Origin of Languages". Scientific American 265 (1): 88–93. DOI:10.1038/scientificamerican0791-88. 
• Bellwood, Peter; Fox, James; & Tryon, Darrell (1995). The Austronesians: Historical and comparative perspectives. Department of Anthropology, Australian National University. ISBN 0-7315-2132-3. 
• Peter Bellwood (1998). "Taiwan and the Prehistory of the Austronesians-speaking Peoples". Review of Archaeology 18: 39–48. 
• Peter Bellwood & Alicia Sánchez-Mazas (June 2005). "Human Migrations in Continental East Asia and Taiwan: Genetic, Linguistic, and Archaeological Evidence". Current Anthropology 46 (3): 480–485. DOI:10.1086/430018. 
• David Blundell. "Austronesian Disperal". Newsletter of Chinese Ethnology 35: 1–26. 
• Robert Blust (1985). "The Austronesian Homeland: A Linguistic Perspective". Asian Perspectives 20: 46–67. 
• Peter Fuller (2002). "Asia Pacific Research". Reading the Full Picture. Canberra, Australia: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. http://rspas.anu.edu.au/qb/articleFile.php?searchterm=3-4-3. Retrieved 28 July 2005. 
• "Homepage of linguist Dr. Lawrence Reid". http://www2.hawaii.edu/~reid/. Retrieved 28 July 2005. 
• Malcolm Ross & Andrew Pawley (1993). "Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history". Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 425–459. DOI:10.1146/annurev.an.22.100193.002233. 
• Scott, William Henry (1984). Prehispanic Source Materials for the study of Philippine History. New Day Publishers. ISBN 978-971-10-0227-5. http://books.google.com/?id=bR2XAQAACAAJ. Retrieved 2008-08-05.  ISBN 978-971-10-0226-8.
• John Edward Terrell (Dec. 2004). "Introduction: 'Austronesia' and the great Austronesian migration". World Archaeology 36 (4): 586–591. DOI:10.1080/0043824042000303764. 
• Zaide, Sonia M. (1999) [1994]. The Philippines: A Unique Nation. All-Nations Publishing. ISBN 971-642-071-4. http://books.google.com/?id=otdEGQAACAAJ. 

References[link]